Survey hints business intelligence may be "killer app" for SOA

A golden opportunity for SOA proponents is presenting itself. A new survey shows that most companies are looking to service-oriented architecture to build out their next phase of business intelligence applications, but that lack of knowledge about SOA may be hindering these efforts. 

This validates what my ZDNet colleague Dana Gardner was just saying in a recent post on SOA value -- where are the applications? As Dana put it: "we seem to have lost our way on SOA evangelism so far, with an ongoing focus on the back-end infrastructure first, with then the promise of better applications and services, someday, some way, to come." Applications is where the concrete business value can be seen, nice and clearly.

That brings us back to BI, the application class du jour everyone needs and wants. In many enterprises, BI and SOA are usually built and managed by two separate teams of people. But it appears the BI implementers are looking to service-orient their applications to make them more flexible and adaptable for future needs. They need help, fast.

A Ventana Research study of 488 companies, reported here in Internet News, finds that a majority of companies plan to implement some type of BI service in the next 12 months. However, while 81 percent said that SOA is important "to some degree" for BI, two-thirds also said "they don't have the right resources to make this happen."

In particular, 53 percent admitted they just don't have enough general knowledge about SOA. Forty-eight percent said they aren't familiar enough with the internal IT resources required to migrate to and support SOA.

This should be welcome news for SOA advocates within enterprises -- more enterprises are interested in BI and analytics than ever before, especially with market pressure to better understand customer segments, motivations, patterns, and even predict behavior. In addition, interest is growing in expanding BI to the entire enterprise, so decision makers can monitor progress and issues from various enterprise inputs via dashboards or portals. Decision makers can be alerted to a potential supply chain disruption in California, for example, and rev up production or orders to suppliers elsewhere to meet any shortfalls.

If there ever was a "killer app" to prove the value of SOA methodologies and technologies, this is it.

Ventana reports that companies intend to deliver BI through enterprise services such as corporate portals (44 percent); business processes (35 percent); enterprise security services (33 percent); transactional applications (28 percent); search (24 percent); and composite applications (18 percent).

All these capabilities require the ability to pull information from different and incompatible data silos from across the enterprises, and make the information reusable to existing and new applications. Isn't that what SOA is all about?