SOA Vision Award 2006 for Enterprise Services - Architecture
CPI (Corporate Publishing International), one of the Middle East´s leading IT publishing house and IDG´s regional partner, the world's largest IT publisher, has held its first SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Forum and presented SOA Vision Awards in association with Dubai Quality Group and Experton. The awards in three categories – B2C (business to consumer), Innovation and Architecture – were based on applications received through out the GCC and evaluated jointly by CPI and Experton.
The forum and awards are based on a survey conducted with over 300 CIOs and IT Managers throughout the GCC. The nominations for the awards were filtered down to 16 top applications for the final evaluation process. These applications represented companies from across the GCC region particularly UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait.
“This event is not only the platform that will recognize Middle East direction setters in the use of IT for business, but will also provide the opportunity for others in the field to share and listen to valuable SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) lessons from the front lines, to be followed by the awards presentation”
“Although the final award winners are from the UAE for having the most advanced SOA roadmap, we need to point out that some of the strongest applications were from Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” said Donald Blair, Senior Advisor, Experton Group. “A major conclusion of our survey of the enterprises in the GCC is that SOA has not yet become “the next big thing”. However, several leading organizations have developed strong SOA programs and are looking forward to the advantages it does offer.”
“Our objective with this study was to learn about SOA in the GCC and the Middle East. Therefore, in order to ensure the broadest coverage possible, we teamed with CPI and the Dubai Quality Group to conduct our survey and to establish the SOA Vision Awards program,” continued Blair. “The program is modeled after the National Association of CIOs (NASCIO) program in the U.S. and we hope it will grow and expand to become an annual event.”
Key results of the SOA survey :
Sixteen of the short listed respondents, or 80%, indicated that they do have an SOA roadmap
Some have teamed with global partners who offer structured methodologies while others have chosen to implement SOA without a partner.
Some respondents are changing out their hardware and software architectures while others are proceeding with the technology they have in place.
Programs range from the early strategic planning stage through pilot programs to larger-scale implementations.
Benefits are being realized by several of the respondents and they have plans to expand and continue SOA in their organizations.
Most of the programs are not time driven and, if and as successful, will proceed over a long period of time.
Numerous services range from internal enterprise access to external customer services.
All of the respondents in the final assessment group are following industry standard SOA (Web Services) standards which will lead to reusability and interoperability; B2C, B2B, G2C, etc. |
