SOA might be the hottest thing to touch organizations, but is the adoption uniform across continents? No, says Steve Au-Yeung, senior VP and GM, Asia-Pacific, BEA Systems, during the closing moments of the BEAWorld 2006 conference in Beijing on 14 December 2006. “Asian CIOs seem to be more impatient and want quicker ROI,” says Au-Yeung.
“In Europe, CIOs and the Board of Directors see SOA as something that is used for cutting costs, while American companies are deploying SOA for competitive advantage.” BEA, which has over 500 companies worldwide using its SOA products, has around 35 clients in Asia Pacific, out of which around seven are from India.
Is this trend likely to continue? Au-Yeung says that Asia Pacific companies are bound to look at things differently-especially China and India, which don’t have that much legacy IT baggage.
“SOA has moved from the ‘do I need it?’ to the ‘how do I convince the management about it?’ phase,” points out Au-Yeung. Asked to provide tips for CIOs on how it can be deployed, Au-Yeung feels that companies should avoid the urge to be over-ambitious. “Companies should try to use SOA in one or two projects, get good ROI, and then use this data to convince the board that an enterprise-wide adoption would yield benefits,” he feels.