Gartner Says Innovation in Enterprise Architecture to Come from Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management in 2004
Web services is the driving force to take SOA and BPM mainstream Event-driven architecture - the next big trend
Egham, UK 15 June 2004 — Enterprises must rethink their IT infrastructure and begin to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM), according to Gartner Inc. It said the combination of BPM and an SOA are crucial steps towards becoming a real-time enterprise, creating the foundation to respond faster to changing business requirements and to react to events in real-time. It highlighted advances in web services technology and standards as the driving forces that will take SOA and BPM to mainstream adoption.
"Until now, service-oriented architectures have only been implemented by a few leading edge enterprises due to high costs and the level of technical skill required," said Massimo Pezzini, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "However, web services are now making it both affordable and possible from a skills point of view. In addition, consolidation of security technologies and maturing standards for web services mean security is no longer a stumbling block. This will accelerate the spread of SOA and make it mainstream in global 2000 companies by 2007."
Pezzini added, "Web services used to be a solution looking for a problem. With Service-Oriented Architecture it has finally found it."
BPM improves process design and integration, making application systems work more efficiently together. It delivers tactical cost/time benefits, while building a base for competitive growth. Regulatory compliance such as Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel 2 are additional drivers for BPM, as they require monitoring of critical business processes and the ability to report abnormal situations in the processes themselves.
SOA allows companies to re-use existing applications and data to create new business processes. It makes the enterprise more agile and less locked-in to certain ways of doing business as applications can be changed faster and more easily.
Gartner warned that impending risk of standard fragmentation will make it more complex for enterprises to reap the full benefits of SOA and BPM during the next three years. However, it advised enterprises to invest now to create the skills and governance processes necessary to leverage SOA and BPM for business advantage.
Service Oriented Business Applications
Gartner said companies such as Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP and Siebel Systems are reacting to the new challenge of service oriented architectures with a new class of business applications called service oriented business applications (SOBA). SOBAs provide extended functionality for use on web services standards. The Gartner web services hype cycle shows that web services for BPM is close to the top of the peak and service-oriented business applications (SOBA) will reach the top of the peak in 2007.
Event-Driven Architecture
As enterprises begin to adopt SOAs on a broad scale, Gartner said complex event processing will become the next challenge. It highlighted event-driven architectures as the next big development to compliment SOA. Enabled by the next frontier of Web services standards, event-driven architectures will allow businesses to detect, report and react immediately to unpredictable events.
"An event driven architecture will have a dramatic impact because it brings unprecedented power to address management of complex business events. It should complement rather than replace SOA and will enable enterprises to react to requests in real-time with an extended reach to customers and partners," said Pezzini.
Gartner recommendations
To effectively implement service oriented and events-driven architectures, and to maximise the benefits from technologies such as web services and BPM, Gartner advised enterprises to establish a permanent Integration Competence Centre (ICC) within the company to act as a link between business units and application teams. The ICC should proactively promote best practices and benefits of advanced integration, provide technical skills, build strategy and deliver measurement models to get the maximum return on investment from adopting application integration technology. It said 30 percent of large enterprises have an ICC today and expects this figure to be 60 percent by 2006.
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