Hype for service-orientated architecture (SOA) is putting off some potential customers, many of which remain confused about its benefits and application.

Steve Rist, head of technology practice at global solutions provider PIPC, said IT managers need to decide which parts of their business will benefit from a move to web-enabled services and which will not – and they should resist pressure from vendors to adopt particular technologies in the meantime.

“Nobody should touch a vendor SOA implementation unless they have a clear understanding of what their future trading model is and what technologies are required to build it. Major clients will typically be multi-vendor [users] anyway,” he said.

Ian Charlesworth of analyst Ovum said SOA is the most hyped area of IT in the last two years, and some confusion has been caused by the fact SOA is an extremely broad church – it is not just about development and application integration, but a range of individual technologies and processes, the need for which vary enormously from one organisation to another.

“Web services and agile applications are a millions miles away from old-fashioned IT organisations that still do lot of manual application integration and hand-coded software,” said Charlesworth. “In contrast, an organisation already running web services on a standards-based architecture may have a much more progressive mindset.”

Some experts suggest a migration to SOA should only be considered at the point when the current IT infrastructure is unable to perform a specific task or function judged essential to business success going forward. Rist added that SOA architecture can also help firms to merge separate IT systems by providing a common web-enabled view of multiple platforms or applications.

“The last three to six months have seen stock markets going like a train, and an incredibly active mergers and acquisition market,” said Rist. “Merging different companies’ platforms can benefit from an SOA view of an IT estate, where one of the key [savings] is often to reduce the amount spent on IT.”

Charlesworth agreed that SOA can help to support the integration of IT systems in some, but not every, merger and acquisition situations. “The classic example is Oracle and its Project Fusion, which is essentially an SOA-based platform designed to integrate the various applications [Oracle] has acquired over the years.” he said.