In a study performed by InfoWorld and BEA, of almost 700 respondents, only 28% were currently working on an SOA deployment, while more than 50% had no plans or didn't know. Mark Carges, CTO of BEA Systems, discusses some interesting results of this study and an SOA self-assessment at BEA, from the priority of SOA efforts in the enterprise and the "pain-points" involved in SOA considerations to the "Vision vs. Reality" disconnect of SOA readiness.

Mark discusses technical and business-side challenges in implementing a Service Oriented Architecture. The tendency to deploy web service pilot projects in a tightly-coupled, point-to-point fashion and the struggles with data that lives in disparate systems cause some SOA projects to be less useful and reusable than they should be. Security and scalability are other problems that can be encountered by organizations deploying web-service architectures.

"The true measure of SOA, at some point someone has to stop writing code, or you're not sharing. At some point the developers have to put their pencils down and say 'I'm not going to build a new thing, I'm actually reusing.'" Unless you can achieve this level of service, even service-oriented solutions won't be the loosely-coupled technologies needed by today's organizations. Mark's view is that in order to get to this level, you have to have an infrastructure that supports integrating these various services and he argues that an infrastructure designed around SOA can help solve these problems and make the transition to SOA less painful and more efficient and valuable.

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Mark Carges, Chief Technology Officer, has been with BEA for more than eight years, and has been instrumental in leading the strategy, development and integration of several BEA products. Prior to his position as CTO, Mr. Carges was Executive Vice President of Strategic Global Accounts, responsible for the leadership and execution of programs that effectively built, expanded, and maintained strong and sustainable relationships with key BEA global customers.

Mr. Carges has a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree in computer science from New York University.

Resources:

• Slides from the keynote
• BEA Systems - SOA Resource Center

This presentation is from InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum held in New York City in May 2005.

For Team ITC:

• Post-production audio engineer: Paul Figgiani
• Description editor: Cori Schlegel