Today's service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives require a strong focus on management and governance in addition to the right set of technology tools, according to research from IT analyst firm Aberdeen Group.

Of the companies surveyed, 60 percent of the SOA best-in-class companies are seeing a positive ROI on their SOA investments. This is achieved through having greater quality throughout the SOA lifecycle as well as employing SOA-specific operations automation and related governance software for automation. Because SOA introduces a myriad of new design, testing, and performance-related issues, IT executives can succeed in developing their SOA lifecycle management plans by concentrating on several primary areas as outlined in the report, including SOA governance and application lifecycle management.

The new benchmark report titled: "Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Application Lifecycle," is based on a survey of more than 210 organizations worldwide. Aimed at identifying emerging best practices for SOA lifecycle management and governance, the independent research was co-sponsored by Mindreef, Inc., a provider of award winning SOAPscope Server and SOAPscope solutions for SOA testing, design-time governance, and SOA Quality Management.

The report cites several primary roadblocks to running an effective SOA, all of which pose an immediate threat to SOA quality. One of these is lowering the cost of lifecycle management. As the volumes of Web services and composite applications scale, change is constant and SOA operational issues become even more obvious. 38 percent of respondents said they were seeing "testing and deployment stage problems spill over into production." The issue is further exacerbated when companies work with inadequate tools to automate the testing, management and governance of the growing number and complexity of Web services and applications that fall within an SOA. Not only is quality and performance at risk, fear of change impact can result in a static, rigid SOA, essentially eliminating the intended benefits of agility.

"The Aberdeen research is another way that we keep a pulse on the roadblocks that inhibit teams from realizing ROI on their SOA implementations," said Mindreef CEO, Lars Borgwing. "What we've heard from our customers who have moved beyond Web services deployments to full-scale SOA initiatives is that continuous testing and a focus on SOA quality are critical. And that using Mindreef's design-time quality management solutions helps them to successfully achieve high re-use of services through the trust and testing abilities created throughout the SOA lifecycle, which ultimately leads to better cost savings, business agility and ROI."

"Users are telling us they really did not pay attention to SOA design-time governance at the planning stage, but as soon as they tried to ramp up production, the need was bulls-eye obvious," said Aberdeen Group's Peter S. Kastner, VP Enterprise Integration and author of the research report. "Continuous testing and a ruthless focus on quality are attributes of the best performing SOA implementations."

Based on its years of industry leadership, innovation and significant customer base, Mindreef's SOAPscope solutions are designed to help multiple teams improve overall SOA quality through collaborative SOA testing, compliance validation, and design-time support and prototyping. By facilitating a deeper understanding about the evolving nature of services, contracts, and interfaces, Mindreef products help SOA and Web services development teams and consumers to participate in the collaborative process of service-oriented design and quality management from the SOA point of view. The resulting trust promotes use and reuse of services, which are especially important as SOA implementations scale and become more complex, the company says.