An SOA environment -- one in which application components are built to be modular, reusable, easily integrated, and consumed on the fly -- promises adopters numerous benefits, such as lower costs, less redundancy among IT resources, and fewer people doing the same work. Its potential to improve efficiency and lower costs has an increasing number of enterprise IT shops looking at SOA and industry watchers forecasting big dollars to be spent on SOA-related technologies in the next few years.
'We're seeing a rapid adoption of SOA in Asia-Pacific and acceleration of adoption has been happening now for the last six to 12 months,' said the Oracle executive, adding that telcos and financial services institutions are the most advanced customers of SOA today.
According to Marriott, other than these two industries, the government is also a big SOA customer in APAC because of the various initiatives that these governments often take that are 'e-citizen'centric,' such as providing a single portal for transactions like renewing licenses and filing taxes. The manufacturing, retail, and distribution industry is also a primary target for Oracle's SOA solutions because of the powerful use SOA has for the industry, added Marriott.
'Telcos and financial institutions get the fastest return from SOA but this is not to say that small companies cannot take advantage of SOA -- they can, but it's the large companies that have a more complex environment, thereby posing greater need for SOA,' said Marriot.
Marriott presented how Oracle Fusion Middleware offers support for the development, deployment, and management of a service-oriented architecture. Key modules in the Oracle Fusion Middleware family include: Oracle Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) Process Manager; Oracle Enterprise Service Bus; Oracle Business Activity Monitoring; Oracle Web Services Manager; and Oracle Business Rules.
'Most organizations today have fragmented business processes where there are multiple systems involved, say for the HR department, and the other departments; with BPEL, these systems are tied together,' said Marriott. SOA enables organizations to cost-effectively build and manage composite applications and integration services.
'It's also very important that IT is integrated with the overall business strategy; the CIO should agree with the CEO as to what business initiative priorities should be,' said Marriot. Through SOA, there is opportunity for organizations to create more agile and adaptable IT and business infrastructures, cites an Oracle white paper.
'Filipino companies are ready for SOA, but certain industries in the Philippines seem to have greater adoption of SOA,' said Marriot, citing telcos and financial service institutions as the top SOA customer-industries in the country, same as with APAC.
While the four primary industry markets for SOA in APAC are telecommunication companies, financial service institutions, government, and the manufacturing, retail, and distribution industries, Marriott said he is not very sure about the Philippine government being as big a customer as in the rest of APAC.
'We're seeing a lot of interest, especially from banks, because banks today are turning to customer-centric ways instead of product-centric,' said Marriott. He added that telcos have always been big IT spenders, especially with the convergence of fixed line and mobile communication technologies. Most telcos, he said, provide Internet services and are looking for specific technologies that will unify these services.
IDG News Service contributed to this story.