Why are 91% of your peers working towards an Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation?

According to IDG Research Services, 91 percent of your peers are planning, evaluating or piloting SOA projects, which certainly reflect strong optimism about the ultimate benefits of SOA.  A successful SOA brings agility to the enterprise by decomposing enterprise applications into reusable and sharable “services,” and hence rapidly eliminating the walls between these applications and business processes.

This free flowing information exchange requires a high degree of data accuracy and consistency, but SOA technology providers have largely ignored this need for a holistic approach to data management and integration. As customers undertake the path to a successful SOA implementation, complex and expensive data integration problems must be addressed in order to overcome the following data centric challenges:

• Heterogeneous data sources distributed across the enterprise and beyond
  
  
• Inconsistent and constantly changing data structures
  
  
• Poor data quality that is often difficult to measure or monitor
  
  
• Lack of agreement or visibility (single-view) into critical information assets

A study by the Data Warehousing Institute found that poor-quality data costs U.S. businesses hundreds of billions of dollars a year. If the data stuck inside siloed applications is bad, imagine the calamity when the silos disappear and data from many different applications is commingled. Bottom line: interconnected applications aren’t worth anything if the data within them is flawed.

These sobering discoveries aside, with SOA adoption clearly accelerating, the payoff for SOA will be great if implemented carefully and correctly, with the appropriate up-front emphasis given to both the data and business process aspects of the business.   CIOs are getting the message.  Approximately 75% of the CIOs surveyed by IDG Research Services consider data integration to be high to critical for a move to SOA.A comprehensive data services platform is the solution for data integration within an SOA framework. By using Informatica’s comprehensive data services platform and proven data integration lifecycle as the foundation for your SOA, you can seamlessly and rapidly resolve complex data integration issues such as data fragmentation, data inconsistencies, poor data quality and lack of data visibility. With SOA, the end justifies the means.

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cioperspective@informatica.com