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By Tony Hallett, 29 September 2006 12:30

COMMENT

You sometimes see people's eyes glaze over after the mention of SOA or web services. Some reach for the revolver if the words service-oriented architecture or enterprise application integration are spoken.

Who can blame them? Any businessman in front of a techie using these words must think they're on the receiving end of some serious psychological warfare.

So what do we need to know, if we're not going to get perfect definitions and cost/benefit arguments? (And you won't here, right now.) How about this: ride the SOA wave over the next 10 years or watch your business or organisation fail. Simple.

Everyone at work should get that, whether non-techie or techie. (And you'd be surprised how many techies can't get their head around SOA/web services.)

The problem, it turns out, is less the move to this approach to using IT - though that is hardly straightforward - but how to communicate the benefits.

On Wednesday I for the first time got to meet Shai Agassi, officially president of SAP's product and technology group but to everyone else one of the smartest and personable faces of Big Software.

His company is trying to show that it gets SOA in a big way and - more importantly - it gets how this shift can help user organisations innovate and be liberated by IT, not bogged down by it.

That's quite a claim for a company with a mixed image. Its success (of a scale that is rare, from a European company) comes from providing software for some of the most ambitious projects and companies. But it has also been associated with expensive and frustrating project failures. And there will be people reading this who only see it in one of those two ways.

But SAP knows it cannot rely on big software installs by customers every five years. They won't put up with that, for one thing. Agassi says there has been "an acceleration of the consumption of innovation" and that, if anything, the need to embrace change has been "under-hyped".

Agassi talked to me about SAP's 'enhancement packages' - bolt-ons, enabled by an SOA approach, to big software installs such as mySAP ERP. I put it to him that it sounded something like an approach in between traditional packaged software and on-demand, the latter perhaps epitomised by the 'School of '98' CRM trio of NetSuite, RightNow and Salesforce.com. I'm not sure he'd considered that.

How will he make customers and potential customers see SOA benefits?

He told me: "You guys [the media] will help us." I started to smile but he had a completely straight face. Maybe he was trying a Jedi mind trick, though he didn't swish his hand in front of my face.

But I took his point. We spoke of lots of other things - Oracle, CRM smoke and mirrors and more - but he knows the IT industry can be bad at communicating this stuff. A lot of the media can get across the main message better.

Hey, we're not his patsies - SOA is worth your time and, if the media were his stooges, we wouldn't write about those cock-ups along the way.