The difficulty of establishing service level agreements for SOA is a huge concern, Grant said. "SLAs are MIA today – we tend to look at topologies and interfaces instead," he said. "We need to know the SLAs of web service components before firing them off to users. The top-end mashup client expects four-nines availability. It's imperative that we identify mismatched or missing SLAs before going into production." And service quality must be maintained throughout the lifecycle of a services-oriented application, he said. For instance, "What if more users want to access a service than expected? Who decides who to bump or what to do about it?" Service-level agreements should be set up to monitor specific performance measures such as throughput, latency, availability and number of concurrent users. "This is not in place," Grant noted, pointing out that it's often hard to even identify the end-to-end flow of mashups and services-oriented applications.

The desire for SOA at Credit Suisse and its compatriots is strong, Grant said. "We want to allow mashups of services that exist in an abstract cloud," he noted. "Users are looking for more agile ways of making money. It's imperative for them to share information about customer opportunities; enterprise 1.0 won't support this."

However, the funding doesn't yet exist to replace large portions of infrastructure, Grant said. "Wall Street had big expectations for SOA, but with the downturn there's no mood for rip and replace," he said. So far, he sees services-oriented technology being adopted for small projects within business silos for such purposes as integration and business activity monitoring. "We're painting a web service veneer onto existing architecture," he said. "We're not getting the benefits of sharing opportunities between business units. The challenge is service-enabling bespoke applications and making them available across the firm."

Besides the lack of SLAs and funding, another hurdle to SOA on Wall Street is that sometimes senior managers don't quite understand the benefits of it, Grant said. "Only when we've made a strong business case will we see the funding and the organizational change needed," he said. He estimates it will be about five years before SOA takes a strong hold in the capital markets.

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