According to this IT organizations that made the investment in SOA infrastructure significantly outperforming companies that develop only web services, or JBOWS, according to a new benchmark report from Aberdeen Group.

"The report, 'SOA Middleware Takes the Lead: Picking Up Where Web Services Leaves Off,' is based on a survey of more than 150 organizations worldwide. In the study, best-in-class companies were twice as likely to have deployed SOA middleware as those that use only web services. Performance was measured in application development and maintenance costs, and in overall end-user satisfaction.

"'IT organizations that are succeeding have realized that enterprise-level infrastructure investments are necessary,' said Perry Donham, Aberdeen's director for enterprise applications research and the report's author. 'Groups that are deploying applications in silos, even when those silos are a mix of web services and SOA, are suffering from the lack of an enterprise-wide messaging infrastructure.'"

Okay, anybody have the same thought I did?

"This just in…fire is hot."

I'm not sure that anybody ever questioned the fact that just a bunch of Web services is even indeed an SOA…it's not. In case you were wondering, and I hope that nobody out there thinks any different, but just the fact that this survey was done leads me to believe that there is still a lot of education that needs to occur.

Just to be clear, you have to turn those services into solutions, and for that you need orchestration, process, binding services, governance, etc.. Just building or exposing services is analogous to creating hundreds of network connections, and never hooking up anything to them.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on August 3, 2007 11:33 AM