One of the ongoing challenges for business today is finding ways to do more with less. Companies are under relentless pressure to deliver products and services to market faster, better and cheaper than ever before. Investments in information technology are expected to drive the business forward, not only in terms of gaining efficiencies and increasing responsiveness, but in creating new top-line opportunities.
Ironically, most corporate IT organizations allocate 75%-85% of their annual budget just to "keeping the lights on." At the same time, research shows that a typical server's average utilization is 15%-25%. While these figures may not reflect your particular organization, they highlight the fact that there's a great deal of inefficiency in IT today, consuming large portions of budgets that could be put to better use for more strategic initiatives.
What's driving this inefficiency?
While there is no single cause, much of it results from mergers, acquisitions or functional silos in the organization - all of which contribute to a bloated IT infrastructure, rife with overlapping and duplicate applications and systems. In the face of tight deadlines and the ongoing demands of the business, IT often opts to live with these redundancies - integrating systems where necessary to keep them consistent. While this approach may result in quick time-to-delivery, it severely inflates recurring costs.
While some IT organizations may be content with this status quo, executive management sees "aligning IT with business" as its number one IT-related concern. However, with as little as 15% of the budget available to service the changing needs of the business, IT just doesn't have room to maneuver. It's this realization that's leading many organizations toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA), an approach to architecting the IT infrastructure that eliminates redundancy and accelerates project delivery via consolidation and reuse of services, often referred to as Web Services.
In the past, SOA adoption was hampered by a lack of agreement on a "common language" for applications to communicate with each other. Happily, Web Services in the form of XML, SOAP, WSDL and other related standards has begun breaking the logjam that made SOA impractical and so has become the foundation technology for building an SOA.
Of course, using Web Services is not a panacea. Though many companies are launching tactical Web Services projects, few are reaping their full value. The value of Web Services escalates when organizations harness the economies of scale of consolidation and reuse. In other words, when customers move from an ad hoc use of miscellaneous collections of Web Services to a more formalized SOA, the value of those services rises dramatically.
Case in point: If you have just one Web Service, but it's used by five different applications due to consolidation or reuse then you have significantly reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) - the essence of SOA. How is that TCO benefit achieved? Every time you can reuse an existing service, whether proactively by planned reuse or reactively by decommissioning redundant services, you buy and operate fewer machines, license and operate less software and manage fewer individual service lifecycles - all significant quantifiable benefits. So the number of times you reuse services in different projects - not the number of services, but, the number of different uses of services - is a quick measure of success in SOA adoption.
