To service-enable or not to service-enable? It's a vexing question. All indications are that the industry is moving -- rapidly, according to some industry watchers; slowly-but-inexorably, according to others -- toward service-enablement and (eventually) full-blown service-oriented architectures (SOA). Such talk is common with any business process consultant, or software engineering consultant, or -- for that matter -- with an increasing number of data management or data warehousing gurus, and they'll tell you the same thing: clients have service-enablement and SOAs on the brain.
The results of a recent SOA survey sponsored by SHARE (the independent mainframe users group) support this: one in four companies have now embarked on SOA efforts, while another one-third are considering or are in the process of planning SOA deployments.
