Adoption of SOA Should Stimulate Strategic Demand for BPM, BAM and BRM

A Rising Tide Raises All Boats

Today's business environment is changing rapidly. Business dynamics and technological innovations have left organizations with a disparate mix of operating systems, applications and databases. This makes it difficult, time-consuming and costly for IT departments to deliver new applications that integrate heterogeneous technologies. The key to success in the networked economy is being able to create business processes to automate value chains, and to modify these processes as business requirements change. Innovation in enterprise architecture will come from service-oriented architecture (SOA), business process management (BPM), business rules management (BRM) and business activity monitoring (BAM).

The Yankee Group 2005 Enterprise SOA Survey discovered that 84% of enterprises either had already deployed SOA technologies or were planning to invest in SOA during the next 12 months. The IT organizations of these enterprises have demonstrated that projects using SOA technologies can be developed more quickly and less expensively than those same projects not using SOA. SOA is resonating well with the overall strategic initiative of "doing more with less." Yankee Group documented the benefits of SOA in the March 2005 DecisionNotes, Enterprises Gain Agility by Making Long-Term Commitments to SOA and SOA Closes the Gap Between Technology Benefits and Business Requirements.

SOA Needs Company

As early-adopter enterprises expanded the number of SOA projects in 2004 and 2005, they encountered additional challenges such as information security and web services management. These SOA pioneers tell Yankee Group that they are currently evaluating these additional requirements and examining product-based solutions. Some are also identifying requirements for process