During a Composite Application Seminar hosted by InterSystems this week Gartner explained the importance of moving towards an enterprise wide service-oriented-architecture (SOA), and the accompanying challenges both end users and vendors face.

Gartner analyst Massimo Pezzini listed the reasons why organisations are currently adopting SOA throughout their infrastructure. These included: cost reduction, escalating integration, business process management needs, the growing maturity of enabling technology, the availability of best practice and the quest for business agility.

However the “pressure of packaged application vendors” is one factor that will cause all vendors to have no choice but to adopt SOA enterprise wide, Pezzini said.