The adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA), a computing architecture that allows an enterprise to make its applications and computing resources, such as databases, available as "services" that can be called upon when necessary, is growing. Gartner, in a new report issued last month titled Applied SOA: Transforming Fundamental Principles Into Best Practices, said that SOA will be used in more than half the mission-critical applications and business processes created this year, and in more than 80 percent come 2010.
No surprise, given SOA's promise: flexible applications, which can be developed quickly, that cut corporate software development costs.
However, as Gartner and others note, SOA projects can fail. There are any number of reasons these efforts don't succeed. The requirements might not be properly defined, the budget might not be adequate, business processes might be misaligned, or there might be problems with underlying data. It could even be that the information-technology department is developing services the business doesn't really need. Or that good SOA baselines aren't formulated and, therefore, there's little chance to show real ROI.
Source: Baseline, http://www.baselinemag.com