Your company is focusing on the application-development process associated with the move to an SOA. What types of challenges are companies facing in this area? The software development process is very stovepiped. As a result, there are a lot of [software] assets and artifacts that are created that are not shared well. When you build a model or a best practice, you need a way to force usage and record compliance. To make good use of SOA, you don't want even 20 Web services where you don't know who produced them and who is consuming them. You don't want to have the Wild West in building Web services.
Do you see companies moving toward an SOA mainly for internal integration or for building new applications out of existing processes? Internal integration is still the dominant driver. We still have not reached the majority of customers with live active business services. There are those in the second generation that are doing external applications ... to integrate to third-party supply chain partners. The ability for our libraries to be shared over major organizations is happening today, but all of them have to some degree outsourced development. Now, they will be developing applications with a partner company.
What are some of the challenges of trying to move to the reuse scenario within an SOA when outsourcing development work? There is someone on a different time schedule building and getting a hold of information. If you want to change your outsourced development group, you do not want to be held hostage. If you don't have a record of knowledge -- to know what happened and who worked on it -- that will be an incredibly difficult thing to do. People want to provide different levels of access to different assets and artifacts, [and] maybe limit an outsourcer to only seeing a portion of the application they are working on.
Do you see companies relying on reuse within an SOA to try to justify continued investment in internal development versus outsourcing? Yes. People want to be able to show that the investment they have made in software development is paying off. Despite the hourly cost-rate differential between a U.S.-based [developer] and an offshore developer, the ability to use and reuse software artifacts allows the overall cost to be very competitive. We are seeing people saying, "This is another way we can compete effectively." They are showing that 60 percent of a project has reusable assets contained in-house. They can locate and use those assets over and over again, [and] will be more effective even if the cost per developer is higher internally than outsourcing.