Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is considered to be an ideal way to help customers bring new products and services to the market faster and increase IT governance while reducing complexity and costs of maintenance. India is considered as one of the top markets in the world as far as IT products and services are concerned. However despite high level of awareness about SOA among Indian companies, the SOA deployment rate has been relatively low.

Explains R Ray Wang, principal analyst, Forrester Research, “Barriers to SOA adoption often relate to upgrade cycles of platforms as well as business requirements by industry. You can expect Financial Services, Healthcare and Telecom to lead in this area. We are in the shift from Web Client to SOA. Over 40% of globally surveyed companies are using SOA with another 20% looking to adopt SOA in the next 12 months. The market in India is emerging. Many of the Infotech and telecom companies have staffed up to support SOA engagements as companies upgrade their software. You can expect the market to grow from not only packaged applications adoption but also custom development adoption.”

Overcoming the misconceptions

While some SOA and Web services management products do offer governance and policy management, CIOs need to recognise the difference between runtime governance and the broader area of SOA governance. The key areas to consider include adoption of open standards, interoperability among other systems, flexibility in support integration and new stakeholders, and ease of use in administration.

According to Wang, “CIOs can overcome the challenges related to SOA deployment. A CIO should be aware about the following issues. They should keep in mind that expensive and disruptive upgrades required along with lock-in to middleware platforms may create fewer applications vendor choices. Current vendor messaging doesn’t resonate with business users and unclear time frames on delivery abound are to be looked at. It is very difficult to verify vendor success in achieving SOA milestones. We are where we were in 1997 talking about Web clients and Internet based applications. We will get there, but the works in progress.”

Though there are numerous benefits attached to SOA, there are also challenges involved in pursuing the SOA dream. Beyond the well-known performance penalty from using XML, there are numerous lesser-known challenges in using a Web services-oriented architecture. G. N. Shrinivas, head, SOA Competency Centre, Bangalore, HP, opines, “While interacting with CIOs it is very difficult to convince them about the misconception that SOA is more of a technology requirement rather than a business decision.”

Indian SOA market booming

Industry analyst firm Gartner estimates that by 2010, at least 65% of large enterprises will have more than 35% of their application portfolios SOA-based, up from fewer than 5% of organisations in 2005. SOA market in India is expected to grow at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 49% from 2006-2009, making it the fastest growing market in the region, as per the Springboard Research report 'SOA in Asia Pacific- Towards More Business Friendly IT'.

However, due to the absence of any specific standard, companies are still not clear about the overall concept of SOA in India. The vendors should follow a standard that enables the CIOs to get a better understanding of the offerings and the concerned problems.

As Shrinivas points out, “Companies can no longer afford to have disconnected technology and business processes that are not aligned to drive business performance. SOA is an ideal way to help customers effectively bring new products and services to market faster. There is a need for the emergence of standard as far as the deployment of SOA is concerned.”

HP SOA Competency Centre

There are various players in the Indian market to serve the customers in the SOA segment. Bearing in mind the growth opportunities in the SOA segment both in India and other countries, HP has established a global SOA Competency Centre in Bangalore with an initial investment of $ 500 million.

The centre is offering a range of services, from enabling customers craft their SOA vision to building up the entire infrastructure. The India centre is supporting the capability creation and service delivery for HP globally. The centre is also a critical component of HP's service offering portfolio and project delivery capabilities to enterprise customers.

“This centre will help us to deliver SOA as an approach to deliver IT services in a secure and manageable way that uses loosely connected, reusable and standards-based technology that can be quickly aligned to changing business needs,” believes Shrinivas.

Drivers Behind SOA Adoption

Most of the market-leading companies with global ambitions are more actively considering SOA than their less ambitious counterparts. The government sector is also showing keen interest in deploying SOA in India. SOA is emerging as the future design standard. Major growth areas reside in projects that are focused around Single Sign On, External Self-Service, Internal Self Service, and Regulatory Compliance. Along with the telecom companies, IT, ITES, Retail, BFSI verticals are seriously looking at SOA as a business enabler for them.

“Both business and technology drive the adoption of SOA and complement each other. SOA reduces custom coding through configuration, adopts open standards to reduce integration costs, enables end users self-sufficiency, provide more flexibility to use best-of-breed and composite applications. While in terms of business, SOA adapts system to processes, not vice versa, improves usability, delivers relevant analytics, connects to external data and services and leverages best practices and industry knowledge,” concluded Wang.