On SOA and gaps in ERP

Like many other online outlets for our industry, ZDNet.com reported and commented on Bruce Richardson’s end-of-ERP opinions of last month. (The Chump did, too, on August 30.)

Richardson, he of AMR Research, presented a future in which “rapid adoption of service-oriented architectures will lead to the end of the ERP market as we know it.” Richardson’s vision has SAP and Oracle customers giving up on those firms’ ERP applications, instead contracting “low-cost Indian or Eastern European integrators to build custom composite applications.” By 2012, the old ERP backbones that had supported all the new independent work would simply become too expensive to maintain and by that time vendors of applications in India and the former Soviet bloc will have discovered their own way to build business process platforms.

Joe McKendrick of ZDNet picks up Richardson’s crystal ball and runs with it a bit, posing the question “Can SOA pick up where ERP leaves off?” McKendrick posted an interview with Washington Group International application integration manager Rich Colton. Washington Group is currently implementing SOA to “effectively fill in the gaps left by ERP systems.”

Headlining the list of quotes is Colton’s statement that “We have not found an ERP system that meets the engineering/construction industry’s requirements,” going on to state that firms such as Oracle and SAP have tried. Due to certain failings in product range, a company like Washington Group is forced to use different systems in data collection. ZDNet reports that “Washington Group employed Oracle Fusion middleware to move to an SOA that would abstract many of the functions used across the company into a common service layer.”

To explain, Colton stated that “By integrating these systems, we can — on the back end then on the front end — build some business processes that aren’t being executed within the legacy application execution systems, and have it done in a layer above that. We can then update the appropriate systems where needed.”

For the full interview and more details on Washington Group’s deployment, go to ZDNet. Boise, Idaho-based Washington Group is a provider of engineering, construction and management for projects ranging from bridge construction to weapons destruction.