Many proprietary service-oriented architecture (SOA) tools are bloated, difficult to use and do not deliver the business benefits claimed, but enterprises continue to invest in them because end-users have little influence over purchasing decisions, according to leading industry experts.
Martin Fowler, chief scientist at IT consultancy ThoughtWorks, told IT Week that his development teams often complain that the tools they are given to develop SOAs lack vital capabilities like configuration control and do not enable testing prior to deployment.
"I haven't seen all [the tools on the market] but we've used many of them and it gets ugly with vendors' SOA-oriented tools," he said. "Granted, the CIOs have limited time [to make purchasing decisions] but the people evaluating the tools have to be the same ones building the apps and the communication channels have become bogged down between them [and the CIO]."
