Last month, Aberdeen Group released a report detailing the findings from analyzing the service orientation results over a period of eighteen months for approximately 400 companies. The analysis revealed a ‘deep division’ between enterprises that simply deploy ‘a bunch of Web services’ and those that take a more strategic and comprehensive approach to service orientation. A lot of great analysis of these findings has emerged within the blogosphere:

• Survey: Done right, SOA pays by Joe McKendrick
• SOA Beginning to Pay Off by David Linthicum
• Survey points to SOA pay off by Tom Jowitt

I’ll let you dig through the report as well as the above posts for more details, but I would like to highlight one interesting aspect of the report. Aberdeen identifies three classifications of SOA maturity that categorize the survey respondents:

1. Best-in-Class (top 20% of aggregate performance scorers) - Characterized by organizations that prioritize investments in education/training, architecture, SOA middleware and infrastructure, and processes aimed at measuring and tweaking performance
2. Average (middle 50% of aggregate performance scorers) - Characterized by organizations that have made minor investments in SOA middleware and infrastructure, very little in education/training, and have virtually ignored organizational performance measurement metrics for refining the enterprise
3. Laggards (bottom 30% of aggregate performance scorers) - Characterized by organizations that have made little to no investment in SOA tools or training/education, tend to deploy Just a Bunch of Web Services (JBOWS), and virtually ignore the importance of governance

Beyond just identifying and labeling these groups, the report provides some compelling metrics around how these three categories drastically impact the ROI realized from service orientation. For example, every one of the Best-in-class organizations saw a reduction in application development costs, compared with only 59% of Average organizations. Those companies identified as Laggards, however, actually saw an increase in application development costs. Similar trends were identified regarding maintenance costs and impacts to user satisfaction.

So the question remains – Are you a SOA Laggard?

I’ve been traveling and teaching a lot since the SOAWorld conference. This past week, a couple of my students challenged me on some statements that I made during the course regarding the notion that Microsoft has arrived a bit late to the SOA table. I find this particularly interesting considering the fact they Microsoft was so instrumental in the early Web services innovations around SOAP, WSDL, etc., but it seems that they have gotten distracted with lawsuits, Office, and Vista, and taken a while to come along with a comprehensive SOA story and supporting infrastructure.

After some interesting and sometimes heated discussions, these students points me toward some resources that shed some interesting light on what Microsoft has been working on. I must admit that I had lost track of .NET 3.0 and the evolution of Indigo into the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). The work that Microsoft has done in this arena is quite impressive and, in true Redmond fashion, elegantly simple. Additionally, one of the students turned me on to Juval Lowy, who has been recognized by Microsoft as a Software Legend and a Regional Director for Silicon Valley. Juval is the brains behind IDesign, a great resource for .NET 3.0, and provides master-level workshops on .NET 3.0 and especially the WCF. The guy is brilliant, has a fascinating perspective on SOA, and a rather compelling and authoritative delivery style. To get a taste you can check out one of his MSDN Webcasts: Applying Service-Orientation to Your Development Process.

On a parallel thread, I ran across an interesting article from Redmond Magazine: “Microsoft Does Have a SOA Strategy“. Dana Gardner, who is quoted in the article, blogs on this subject and describes the strategy as ’service-enabled’ and ’sorta-SOA’. Another analyst quoted in the Redmond article describes Microsoft’s strategy around SOA as ’standards-based at the edge’. The article also identifies that Microsoft is focusing more upon empowering individuals and small teams rather than ’selling a big, fat SOA stack’. This is certainly consistent with their strategy in other areas of the enterprise. The reality of, course, is that Redmond will not sit idle while the IBMs, Oracle’s, and SAPs of the world carve up the enterprise marketplace. More infrastructure components are coming from Microsoft in the next iteration of Biztalk and the full realization of .NET 3.0, especially the Workflow Foundation (WF) piece.

One final thread regarding Microsoft’s SOA strategy is an apparent attempt to take the ‘ESB leadership’ that the big Java vendors have managed to secure in the industry and turn it around as a liability. Rather than trying to compete against these established ESB vendors directly, Microsoft is attempting to paint the notion of an ‘enterprise’ bus as short-sighted and internally-focused strategy. The next generation, according to Redmond, is the Internet Service Bus (ISB) which turns the attention outward to the extended-enterprise, consisting of partners, clients, and the information superhighway at large. Whereas traditional ESB solutions focus within the enterprise. The ISB turns the attention to interaction between enterprises. I’m not sure how much of that is real and how much is fluffy rhetoric, but it is an intriguing perspective.