There are few topics that generate more excitement within the IT industry today than SOA. As an architectural approach for building and operating applications that implement business processes or services using a set of loosely coupled components to deliver a predefined level of service, it is exciting many users in its potential. There is debate over what exactly constitutes a SOA implementation, but as we note below, the enterprise that actually make substantial material steps in what they define as a SOA journey remains a minority. However, SOA has certainly sparked an enormous amount of investment by the technology vendors, many of whom are racing to provide the latest upgrade to their SOA platforms, or announce the SOA enablement of their existing product set.

Among all of the current focus on user challenges around the ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘when’ of SOA adoption, and the strengths and challenges of different SOA technology platforms, there is one other very important constituency in SOA development that has received less exposure to analytical scrutiny: the role of the IT services vendors. The consulting, systems development and outsourcing industry generates billions of dollars from business process, application & architecture-related projects and management/outsourcing services, which SOA is influencing in a number of ways.

So, how are service providers positioned to exploit the project services opportunity related to SOA? What are their strategies and approaches in exploiting the commercial opportunity in helping clients embark on and move along the SOA journey? What is their current SOA capability and experience, how far do their ambitions stretch in relation to the SOA opportunity? These are some of the issues we recently re-examined in a series of in-depth discussions, interactions and workshops with a selection of services providers, including Accenture, Atos Origin, Capgemini, CSC, EDS, IBM, LogicaCMG, TCS, Wipro and Infosys.

Current client perceptions of, and demand for, SOA advice and systems integration are key factors in determining the types and levels of investment IT service firms should make in this area. It is therefore a good place to begin our assessment.