More education is still needed to help increase the adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), according to channel players who already sell the technology.
Ken Phillips, sales director at VAR Compel Sysao, told CRN that take-up so far has been mainly in large enterprises. This was also reflected in our latest CRN Online poll.
“We are seeing most of the adoption at the high end,” Phillips said. “There is still a lot of education that needs to be done at the lower end. Resellers trying to get into selling SOA must get to know their customer first, it is not a quick sale and will be an ongoing education process as far as the end-user is concerned.”
Jon Hillier, solutions director at VAR Teamsolve, agreed.
“The best thing a VAR can do to help adoption of SOA by SMEs is to become their IT director and foster long-term relationships,” he said.
“We have seen take-up across the board, in terms of size and verticals, but all of our customers are focused very heavily on return on investment, and not tearing out their existing infrastructure, which we have been able to do by deploying SOA.”
Vendors have also jumped on the bandwagon, with players such as IBM, BEA, Oracle and SAP all developing SOA solutions.
Oracle has attempted to push its SOA offering, under its Oracle Fusion MiddleWare brand, into the SME market through its VARs.
Tim North, applications SME business development at Oracle UK, said: “We try to help our VARs to educate the market by using marketing activities and training initiatives. It is about bringing greater awareness of the technology to the end-user marketplace.”
Phillips said that end-users are getting over their preconceived ideas about the Oracle offering.
“Some customers have concerns that the Oracle offering is too expensive and complex and that they are too small to get support from Oracle,” he said. “But because Oracle is using its partner network we can install it and provide all of the ongoing support ourselves.”
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