Australians take great pride in being early adopters of technology, embracing everything from DVDs to mobile phones and Hannah Montana at breakneck pace after their introduction. The same has proved true when it comes to implementing SOA, although the term may not have been used at first, as people usually spoke of Web services instead.

Experimentation with Web services grew out of the gargantuan effort to upgrade or replace systems threatened by the dread Millennium Bug, which was actively addressed in Australia through high-level government efforts that saw the replacement of many legacy systems. Many other systems were retained and extended, however, and were kept running with a spaghetti of integration code that was the digital equivalent of bubblegum and Scotch tape.

Shortly thereafter, even as the dot-com implosion dampened enthusiasm for all things Web-related, government departments and large businesses—long the trend-setters among Australia's top-heavy ICT industry—began exploring Web services as a way of adding some order to their mess of bubble gum and Scotch tape. Coupled with growing expectations of better ICT governance, which, in turn, spawned major development and documentation efforts, the idea of SOA was firmly entrenched in the country.

Were you to pick an Australian SOA adopter early this decade and ask what kind of SOA they'd implemented, however, you'd get a range of answers.

Many developers were rolling their own Web services, a SOAP documentation manual in one hand and a Red Bull in the other.

Others opted for third-party integration solutions from the likes of TIBCO, Viewlocity, IBM and BEA, whose efforts in standards-based SOA let customers hitch a ride towards broader, more standards-compliant frameworks. Still others, recognizing the transformative power of SOA, boarded the train of third-party application vendors like SAP, leveraging their early work in Web services into a far-reaching SOA platform.

These days, SOA is business as usual in Australia, with all four of the country's major banks, major government organisations like Australia Post and the Commonwealth Department of Education, and a wealth of large businesses already well committed to SOA. Analyst firm Springboard Research recently pegged the Australia-New Zealand SOA market as the Asia-Pacific region's star performer, with revenues jumping 36% annually to reach A$748m by 2010, up from A$221.3m in 2006. Then quite recently, the state of Victoria's State Revenue Office kicked off a 10-year SOA rollout to modernize systems handling A$8.6 billion in annual revenue. The success of SOA in Australia isn't just about big names, however: the approach is rapidly pushing into smaller organizations from its traditional home in the rarefied heights of the large corporate and government sector.

Early adopters indeed. Eight years after the Millennium Bug, many firms are now looking to once again modernize the systems they implemented back then. With SOA technology well-proven and vendors falling over themselves to help out, new projects will likely emerge with increasing rapidity. It may have taken a while to agree on just what SOA means, but it's clear the SOA ball is now well and truly rolling Down Under.

Email : david@braue.com