IT service management powers SOA success

Ovum Summit identifies tight links between SOA success and state-of-the-art IT management strategies

For immediate release August 9, 2006. Composite service-oriented architecture (SOA) business services are stressing traditional IT management strategies and tools to the breaking point. This is what many CIOs are learning the hard way, according to Ovum Summit, the analyst and consulting company. Successful SOA deployments demand state-of-the-art IT management strategies.

Ovum Summit recently conducted a survey of 333 North American IT decision makers representing a mix of enterprise and mid-market customers. The survey identified strong connections between an organization's commitment to managing IT as a set of services and the success of their SOA implementation. Mary Johnston Turner, Ovum Summit Vice President and author of the survey comments:

"Our survey strongly indicates that successful SOA deployments need to be supported with management strategies that take an end-to-end, cross-tier look at the dependencies and relationships across the full set of systems and software used to enable end-to-end business services. Traditional IT management approaches assume tight connections between systems and applications while SOA environments are much more loosely coupled."

"Customers who have not made major changes to their day-to-day IT operations management environment can't keep up with the operational demands of SOA as it scales up from pilot project uses to full blown enterprise-wide implementations," says Turner.

The study found that the customers who have implemented IT service management best practices such as ITIL along with policy-based automated management tools are twice as likely as other firms to report that their SOA investments are meeting all their IT and business goals.

Results show that the most satisfied SOA customers aim to improve business flexibility and IT's responsiveness to changing business needs. The least satisfied customers appear fixated on development cycle time and software reuse improvements, but tend to overlook the increased levels of operational complexity that result from runtime deployment of SOA.

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To speak to Ms Turner about her research or ongoing analysis of vendor and customer IT management software strategies and plans, please contact pr@ovum.com. Alternatively, you can contact any member of our PR team listed below directly for additional assistance.

About Ovum Plc

Ovum's primary activity is providing value-added advisory services and consulting to retained and project clients. The company acts as a well-respected and trusted source of industry data, knowledge and expertise on the commercial impact of technology, regulatory and market changes. Ovum engages in continuous research and industry analysis to determine market dynamics in its specialist sectors.

Ovum has developed long-standing relationships with many of its corporate clients, which include major international blue-chip companies such as Alcatel, AT&T, BT, Cable & Wireless, Cisco Systems, Deutsche Telecom, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Telstra and Vodafone.

For further information:

North America:

Sara Kaufman
Tel: 617-722-4602
Email: sara.kaufman@ovum.com

EMEA

Claire Booty
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7551 9081
Email: claire.booty@ovum.com

Asia-Pacific
Tanisha Kuckreja
Tel: +61 3 9601 6723
Email: tanisha.kuckreja@ovum.com