SOA is still going strong.  Businesses that already use SOA are expanding their SOA initiatives and new businesses are starting to adopt SOA and to implement SOA technologies.  Another interesting fact is that the first-time SOA infrastructure purchase is shifting from ESBs to other technologies.

According to a recent survey from Forrester analytics, SOA still has strong penetration and high satisfaction rates.  About 75% of enterprise respondents and 80% of small to midsized businesses that responded are planning on expanding their use of SOA.  Back in 2009, the Global 200 enterprises had shown a drop in satisfaction.  Only 18% responded that SOA was meeting all or most of their expectations.  In 2010, this number rose to 33%, which is more in line with earlier years.

The utilities/telecom sector and the financial/insurance sector are still leading other verticals in terms of SOA adoption and satisfaction.  Healthcare and public sectors still trail behind the rest of the pack.  Geographically, North America and Europe show similar penetration patterns for SOA, but North America shows higher satisfaction rates.

Probably the most interesting finding of the survey is that interest in ESBs, which have been seen as the starting point for SOA architecture, is actually declining.  While in 2009 48% of respondents who had only made a single SOA purchase had an ESB. In 2010, that number dropped to 39%.  According to Forrester analyst Randy Hefner, the shift of focus away from ESBs stems from the increasing similarity of SOA specialty products (like SOA management tools and SOA appliances) as well as a desire to make SOA simpler and stronger.

So, how can service-oriented architecture (SOA) and master data management (MDM) become hand-in-glove concepts?  Cloud computing, meanwhile, may cover both bases.  The newer MDM technologies are designed from the ground up to be service oriented, MDM being newer-age technology is naturally SOA based. SOA is useless without MDM content.  SOA doesn‘t address data; it only addresses processes.  What‘s the use of having SOA if you‘re not taking care of the data side?

The same thing for MDM.  MDM is really a misnomer.  MDM is not really a data hub; MDM is actually a process hub.  In addition to storing data, you are also executing a bunch of rules in some BPM [business process management] system.  So it‘s much more than a database; it‘s really a process hub.

Once an organisation has an MDM hub, an SOA is the best way to orchestrate new applications with that data.  What do you use to shuttle that data around?  Now that people aren‘t typically using file transfer or ETL; they‘re using SOA and the older ETL products have evolved to become SOA aware.  In fact, the large SOA leaders have all been moving into MDM.  Forrester Research, in a February 2011 report on MDM trends, said consolidation was a big theme for 2010, with a number of large data management software vendors picking off the best and brightest of MDM pure plays.

The SOA people have been busy building services and ESBs, but you if look at the MDM products, they provide this out of the box, Oracle and IBM in particular have 300 to 400 SOA services built into their MDM systems.

Yet in some cases, MDM and SOA efforts are like parallel universes.  It‘s been a decade since SOA came to the fore and people still don‘t get it.  A lot still think it‘s Web services, and they totally ignore MDM.  But for those who really are realising that there‘s a lot to be gained in making loosely coupled services, they‘re also figuring out they need the data element too.

Part 2 to follow next week.