According to Alok Pant, senior vice president, Global Marketing and Alliances, Intelligroup, the "experimental stage with SOA in India is over and the new generation of SMBs are coming up to adopt SOA." Excerpts from an interview:

Alok Pant: The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software industry is well established in India and has high adoption rate among enterprises and SMBs. The ERP majors including SAP, Oracle though work on different platforms have made their applications more SOA-friendly realizing the benefits technology can bring in.

The role of IT in business success is getting increasingly important. The success of any business depends on the ability to identify opportunities and leveraging the same. The difference between traditional IT systems and SOA-based systems lies in the level of flexibility, i.e., the adaptability to change that SOA-based systems inherently have. This adaptability allows these systems to be altered quickly so as to support any new business opportunity and hence allow the business to leverage these opportunities to the fullest.

CIOL: Are Indian SMBs open towards adopting SOA?

AP: SMBs are definitely adopting SOA but not on a very large scale in India. SOA is relatively a new technology and the early adopters have been very innovative industries. It takes years before a technology is accepted and adopted on a large sale and its true about SOA.

The success story of early adopters have been infusing SMBs to adopt SOA. I expect large number of SMBs adopting SOA in the next 2-3 years in India too.

CIOL: How easy can it be for an SMB to adopt SOA? What are the frequent challenges they face?
 
AP: There can be several challenges that SMBs face. They include:

• Why: An organization should put considerable thought as to why it should move down the SOA path and what would be the benefits that would accrue. A clear understanding of this would form the basis of subsequent steps.
• Starting: It is important to determine how to start a SOA initiative and the order of activities to perform.
• Governance: To reap full benefits of SOA adaptation, an organization needs to   have good governance strategy in terms of service development standards, guidelines and run-time policies. It is also important to ensure that SOA initiative moves in an orderly manner.

CIOL: Is SOA adoption vertical specific?
 
AP: SOA can be adopted by firms irrespective of the vertical. Adoption of SOA helps to cut costs and bring flexibility in operations. Being a new technology, we have seen high adoption of SOA among high tech and Life Sciences industry. In the next 2- 3 years, there should a vast change in the trend with more business across verticals adopting SOA.