If “Move to a service-oriented architecture” was one of your New Year’s resolutions, you’re not alone. According to the McKinsey Quarterly’s What’s on CIO agendas in 2007 survey (free; registration required), nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of the CIOs they surveyed said they were planning to move to an SOA within the coming year. The other major trend McKinsey identified was the introduction of lean-manufacturing principles to data center operations.

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Bruce Graham, BEA’s Vice President of Professional Services, and Mike Piech, Senior Director of WebLogic Product Marketing, to get their reactions to the McKinsey Quarterly survey and to ask them for their own predictions on what’s in store for CIOs in the coming year.

“We’re delighted to see McKinsey reflect the need for SOA and for virtualization,“ Graham said . “Starting in 2003, our message to our customers was ‘Deploy SOA now.’ In fact, that was the motto of our 2004 eWorld conference.

“Then in 2005 we watched CTOs become the main sponsors of SOA, and that filtered up to CIOs in 2006. And over the next year or two, we expect to see SOA on the CEO’s agenda.”

But because CIOs and CEOs speak two different languages (or, perhaps, more accurately, different dialects), Graham warns that CIOs must act as interpreters between the IT side and the business side.

“CIOs will be the ones tying this together, and they will need to speak two languages. CIOs talk about services, but that doesn’t mean anything to a CEO. CEOs speak processes; that’s the language of business. Now we know that processes decompose to services, but business leaders want to know about process. It's a different language. CEOs want to know how it will help them run the business.”

“That’s why we’re made the investments we have. BEA has been there from the beginning with SOA, and we’ve devoted a tremendous amount of time and effort to marrying business process modeling to architecture. Three or four years ago we were saying ‘Deploy SOA now,’ and essentially we’re saying the same thing now about BPM. Deploy BPM now to get ahead of the curve and to ensure you can translate from IT ‘language’ to exec ‘language.’”

The other major trend McKinsey identified for 2007 is applying lean-manufacturing principles to data center operations—also known as virtualization.

Like SOA, virtualization is about doing more with less, while making your enterprise more agile. Mike Piech, Senior Director of WebLogic Product Marketing, explains.

“Virtualization gives you three major benefits: increased utilization, increased agility, and, with the BEA solution at any rate, no performance penalty.”

While some virtualization solutions run more slowly than their hardware counterparts, Piech explains that BEA’s Web Logic Server Virtual Edition is leaner and faster. “We’ve stripped the entire operating system out of the stack. VE has the bare minimum of information that it needs to run, so it runs as fast or faster than standard WLS.”

When asked about the future of virtualization, Piech says “The world will convert to virtualized infrastructure. It lets you do more work with less labor, electricity, and maintenance, and you can provision services on the fly. There’s really no downside.”

• To read the McKinsey Quarterly survey, click here (registration required).
• For more on integrating BPM with SOA, click here.
• For more on WebLogic Server Virtual Edition, click here.