SOA: Promising and Long Lasting Trend?

As Gartner notes, approximately half of all 2007 major projects in the world were made on SOA. According to analysts, 60% of organizations will adopt the approach, and by 2010 it will be used in 80% of new systems. IDC forecasts that corresponding software expenses will constitute 11 billion dollars.

Whereas 2007 was the year of pilot projects giving an opportunity to customers to test SOA efficiency when developing and using business applications, the year of 2008 will witness double increase in SOA-related expenditures and further development of the most successful projects as customers are willing to implement the technology into business processes.

Experts at SAP believe that SOA is a perfect option for companies that previously had to choose between standard ERP solutions and pricey custom ones. Still with all its advantages (flexibility in changing business processes, service security and reliability, cuts in operational IT costs) SOA is not a panacea for all technology integration problems a company may face.

Expert forecasts concerning SOA advancement in Russia are pretty optimistic. Up to 70% of projects will use SOA in 2008 and at least one of the reasons for this is that all the current middleware platforms some way or another already use SOA at present. Various verticals demand SOA implementation however only a few, Finance and Telecom, have mature enough IT processes and sufficient budgets to start off with SOA.

Forrester analysts expect leading software providers will spend the next couple of years on developing more dynamic applications with better support of cross-functional business processes. Although the demand for SOA is growing, they will have to find new ways to promote their business applications. Hopefully SOA will be a more promising and long lasting trend than all the previous technological tendencies as the focal point of SOA is business but not technologies.

Source: Cnews (in Russian)

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When Business Meets IT: Software Development Summit 2008

In the outsourcing industry, where trust, reliability and credibility are a passport to success, establishing personal contacts during face-to-face meetings of customers and providers are essential. Quite a number of industry events which bring all its representatives together are held regularly all around the globe to facilitate discussions burning issues, experience sharing, and establishing new business relations.

The eighth annual Software Development Summit took place in St. Petersburg, Russia earlier this month. The focal point of the Summit was all the segments of software development industry combining export, internal market, licensed products, and IT outsourcing. Belarus, Russia, Germany, Italy, the USA, Finland, Ukraine, and many other countries delegated their representatives to the event. They all had a wonderful opportunity to present new projects done both for foreign and domestic companies, to discuss world business development tendencies. The problem of work force and its training was also given careful consideration to as qualification of company’s staff is one of the prerequisites for customer base expansion, reputation build-up, and market share enhancement in today’s highly competitive environment.

Among those who took the floor there was Peter Schumacher, the founder and president of Value Leadership Group who described the New Competitive Paradigm in the European IT services. One of the 4 strategic options for Russian offshore IT services firms presented by the speaker was developing alliance with India, which at the first glance seems quite an unusual scenario. Although there may be a couple of techniques Eastern Europe’s and Russia’s ITO providers could learn from them trying to combine their skills with India’s scope and scale.

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Want to Stay in the Game - Be Progressive!

A clear correlation between IT organizations that deliver IT services at a more strategic level to the business, and how businesses perceive their IT organizations was revealed in the research conducted by a UK based industry analyst Freeform Dynamics.

It says: “There is indeed such a thing as the ‘progressive’ IT organization”. For such organizations it is important to be delivering services to the business at a strategic level meaning taking into consideration what can be kept in-house and needs to be sourced; learning from the experiences of more progressive IT organizations; adopting new working practices and of course, being more than just a cost centre!

Moreover, the research provides a number of steps IT organizations can take to deliver a significantly higher level of service to the business:

- The IT organisation needs to get the basics right
- Create a common language between business and IT
- Establish a peer relationship between business and IT
- Work towards co-ordinated goals and objectives
- Manage IT as a business-driven portfolio
- Foster relationships with key IT suppliers.

The conclusion drawn by the research is “the more progressive IT organizations will be better placed to manage the ongoing integration process that will be required, and deliver appropriate services to the business as a result”.

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