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By Steve Ranger, 5 May 2005 14:30

NEWS Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) will turn into another "useless fashion" unless vendors get better at explaining its potential to improve the alignment of IT and business.

Companies need more clarity on the opportunities and challenges associated with SOA, according to a report published by analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton (MWD).

The report "SOA: handle with care" said that while the simple view of SOA as web services-based middleware for integration and application development can bring benefits, this is too short-sighted a focus to improve the alignment of IT and business.

And this narrow view of SOA may set expectations which can't be realised, it warns.

Most of the current thinking on SOA focuses on the issues faced by software developers in building web services, but this is just one part of the overall picture, the analysts said.

Neil Macehiter, a partner at MWD, said if SOA only tackles software development it will add nothing new.

"With many of the IT vendors marketing SOA offerings focusing primarily on the software development issues, SOA might as well stand for Something Altogether Ordinary," he added.

MWD said that SOA will only deliver value in the long term if it links the different perspectives of IT - as experienced by software developers, operations staff and most importantly the business groups which set IT budgets and drive projects.

Neil Ward-Dutton, co-author of the report said: "The real potential of SOA to transform the alignment of IT and business comes from the ability of web services technologies to unite the various different perspectives that different groups have of what it means to deliver an IT service.

"But unless the vendors start explaining this properly, SOA could easily become just another useless fashion."