Enterprises in Malaysia are beginning to consider adopting SOA (service-oriented architecture) as a strategic tool to help them lower IT costs and gain quicker time-to-market with their products and services, according to SAP.

And the German software giant is seeing these adoption trends across the Asia-Pacific region, said Anderson Ding, solutions architect manager, SAP Malaysia.

?"Our experience in Malaysia has shown that although many [enterprises] may not yet know how to implement SOA, they understand the concept of SOA and the benefits it brings to them," Ding told ZDNet Asia Tuesday, on the sidelines of the SAP summit 2007. "This is the first step toward realizing SOA in any organization."

SOA is defined as a methodology or framework that uses loosely coupled services or software components, enabling systems to be more flexible and cost-effective. Its much-touted advantage is its ability to facilitate the reusability of software assets, which enables enterprises to reduce cost and bring their products and services to market more swiftly.

Simon Dale, senior vice-president and chief technology officer, SAP Asia Pacific and Japan, said 2007 will be marked as the year of the mass adoption of SOA.

"What we've seen is that we don't have to convince customers about SOA anymore," Dale said. "Their maturity and understanding of SOA are higher than before, and they are more practical about [their approach to] SOA as they recognize its strategic value to their organizations."

He noted that this is because SOA is starting to bridge the gap between IT and business. Traditionally, he said, the framework had mainly been the domain of IT engineers and business decision makers. Of late, it has gained a much broader audience.

"Executives are beginning to acknowledge SOA as having a direct impact on their businesses," Dale explained. "This has forced them to take more risks [to invest in SOA] and to consider it as a long-term, strategic goal to help their businesses grow."

Justifying investments
According to a study by IDC, 58 percent of respondents surveyed said they have plans to implement SOA in their organization in the next 12 to 24 months. The research house estimated that SOA services market in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, was worth about US$340 million in 2006. IDC projects that this market will grow by 89 percent to reach US$641 million by the end of 2007.

Walter Lee, vice-president of IDC Asia-Pacific, said the survey indicates enterprises are beginning to see the qualitative benefits of SOA to their business.

"SOA's greatest proposition is that an enterprise can reuse its software assets which helps them reduce the cost of implementation and deploy new applications quickly," Lee told ZDNet Asia. "These benefits are beginning to sink in for many enterprises today." The IDC analyst was also a speaker at the summit.

However, many organizations that are keen to adopt the framework still face a number of challenges going forward, he noted. For example, Lee said, they will need to ensure the qualitative benefits can be translated into genuine returns.

"At the end of the day, CIOs need to consider what SOA means in dollars," he said, adding that companies need to evaluate the cost savings and decide whether it would make more economic sense to build an application from scratch or on an SOA platform.

"They must also ask how much time-to-market advantage it would have gained using SOA, versus if it had not," Lee said. "In the end, it's about justifying the actual cost savings an enterprise would benefit if it were to implement SOA."

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