Many proprietary service-oriented architecture (SOA) tools are bloated, difficult to use and do not deliver the business benefits claimed, but enterprises continue to invest in them because end-users have little influence over purchasing decisions, according to leading industry experts.
Martin Fowler, chief scientist at IT consultancy ThoughtWorks, told IT Week that his development teams often complain that the tools they are given to develop SOAs lack vital capabilities like configuration control and do not enable testing prior to deployment.
"I haven't seen all [the tools on the market] but we've used many of them and it gets ugly with vendors' SOA-oriented tools," he said. "Granted, the CIOs have limited time [to make purchasing decisions] but the people evaluating the tools have to be the same ones building the apps and the communication channels have become bogged down between them [and the CIO]."
He added that open-source SOA tools such as those from the Spring Framework and Ruby on Rails are usually more limited in their functionality, but that this often makes them more effective.
Cyndi Mitchell, UK managing director of ThoughtWorks, argued that the trend for vendors to keep adding features to their products in order to steal a march on rivals can undermine usability.
"It creates a beast of a product that takes a [great deal] of intellect to work out how to use and a lot of computing power to run – SOA tools are well known for this," she argued. "There are gaps between the tools and the uses of those tools, and a lot of it is driven by fear – customers make big purchases because they think they need them and then fail to put them to good use."
Karen Jaworski of CA's Wily enterprise application management division argued that firms may have problems with SOA tools that are in fact old tools that have been repurposed as such.
"Repurposed tools rare provide everything you need, but some of the newer technology on the market has been built from the ground-up for SOA implementation," she argued. "Many people think implementing SOAs is all about the technology, but in reality only 20 percent of it is – the rest is what you need to do from a business perspective."
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