Service-Oriented Architecture Paradigm: Major Trend or Hype for the German Banking Industry?

Although Service-orientation is based on known concepts like autonomy and loose coupling of software components, the standardization of Web Service technologies has led to a rising adaptation of serviceorientation in the research community as well as in the software industry over the past years. While Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are widely accepted as a new enterprise systems architecture paradigm, the current impact of the SOA paradigm on certain industries (including the German Banking Industry) has not been surveyed yet in detail. This paper describes a survey we conducted among business/IT architects from Germany’s 1020 largest banks. The subject of this survey was to identify if SOA is regarded as a major trend or as hype. Thus, we propose nine hypotheses from three areas regarding the impact of SOA on the German Banking Industry which are the foundation for the questionnaire used in the survey. Furthermore, we present intermediary results from our survey and briefly present preliminary conclusions from the available data.