Anand Gopalan's Blog Integration Consortium

IT Majors, Software consulting companies are no mood to catch up the race later , but rather dive as soon any technology is announced be it SOA,ESB,CEP. Do they really practise it in their own den?#*!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Many a times we see major IT Software Service provider companies tout on their experience on the implementation of latest technology/design principles in their customer projects. But if those principles are universally accepatble across various problem domains, why not implement them in their own company first before taking it to the customer.Have you ever seen any IT Major in consultancy business talk about how successfully SOA or Ajax or web services initiatives turned their own business more agile,profitable. The reasons are multifold

1) Most of the times the R&D or experiment happens at the expense of the customer. Since these days the design principles like SOA are open standards based and have solid underlying concepts they work more often and the vendors get away with success. While they show success stories of Major process optimization across various domains like HR, Finance etc in ther client assignments, they may be battling with the age old systems with tight coupling in their own organization due to constraints like finance, time, loss of billability if such resources (Consultants,developers) are used for internal architecture revamp rather than on an client project.

2) High competetion. If some company can afford to try things and prove their capability in a new or maturing technology, the other competitors can catch the bus and grab those coveted projects. That makes sense , as the cost and time to market becomes a crucial factors in many projects. Hence such wait and leap will not fly with demands of current IT projects.

This blog is not to totally discount the fact that some mulitinational product / service provider companies are there in business, who practise what they preach. Like for instance I saw a presentation from a SOA Product Vendor explaining how they successfully implemented their Colloboration product suite in their own company with full fledged blogging, messaging , conferencing and wiki unification before taking such solutions it to the customer.

I feel more and more such success stories from the vendor companies themselves not just customer testimonials can instill full confience on their capabilities