Systems Management Initiatives Tap SOA to Boost Systems ROI
By David Almquist and Lane F. Cooper
BizTechReports.com

IT managers tasked with “innovating” are re-thinking their systems management strategies by harnessing the potential of services oriented architectures…or SOA. The move to SOA represents a major departure from traditional systems management practices of identifying projects that need to be automated, and then dedicating technology resources accordingly.

This old way of doing business has often led to redundant capital investments and low resource utilisation rates that have upped costs without necessarily improving performance. Instead, say industry observers at Wintergreen Research, a critical mass of IT managers are now looking for ways to optimise the value of their systems by using solutions such as SOA to consolidate, virtualise and then share resources from a pooled set of capabilities that can be quickly and cost effectively to bear on the constantly changing priorities of the enterprise.

"IT managers have been studying how they can best optimise their physical servers and hardware," says says Samir Mehta, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise Marketing Manager at IBM. "They’re looking at storage virtualisation and maybe desktop virtualisation. But application virtualisation is just beginning to be addressed, with the utilisation rate of the typical server running at about 15 percent."