Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is transforming the entire IT industry. However, nowhere will this transformation be as profound as in that segment of the systems integration industry that helps clients adapt and continually align their business models and business processes to the continually changing needs of their companies. Systems integrators (SIs) are rapidly expanding programs to create large repositories of SOA-based business services that can be reused across multiple engagements. Over time, this activity is likely to transform the economics and the entire value proposition of the IT services industry.
However, this is only the start. These reusable business services, when combined into composite applications, will begin to look suspiciously like applications. This similarity will be particularly evident as application vendors increasingly componentize their own applications around the same SOA standards as are being used by the SIs. Does that mean that SIs will come into increasingly direct competition with the application vendors with which they now partner? SI responses to this question range all across the waterfront, from an adamant ‘no’, to a definite ‘yes’, to a tentative ‘maybe’.
We consider these issues to be so important, and so little understood, that we have decided to write a three-report series to dissect these trends from three different perspectives. In this first report of the series, we explore how SOA will transform the IT services industry - particularly those SIs that help customers optimize business processes for the needs of the business. In the second report, we will examine how SOA - and the SI’s use of the technology - will transform the application software industry - both the huge application platform vendors (including SAP, Oracle and Microsoft) and the large number of smaller, more specialized ISVs that focus on specific industry segments or business processes. In the third report in this series, we will assess how the adoption and exploitation of SOA technologies and principles will alter the ways in which SIs and ISVs will co-operate, compete and sometimes merge with each other to address the needs of customers and to ensure their own survival.
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