ZenSar and SOA Software Partner on Offshore SOA

Posted by Andy Dornan on January 3, 2008

Offshore outsourcing company ZenSar has href="http://www.indiainfoline.com/news/innernews.asp?storyId=55214&lmn=1" target="_blank">announced
a partnership with management and governance vendor SOA Software. Though
the partnership is new, the two companies aren't strangers to each
other. In May last year, ZenSar href="http://www.ebizq.net/news/8141.html" target="_blank">acquired SOA Software's
services business for $24.9 million. As well as giving SOA Software a
way to fund its growth without raising additional funds from VCs, the
deal also highlighted that international outsourcing isn't always a
one-way street.

ZenSar says that the deal makes it one of the few Indian outsourcing
companies with a full SOA offering, which is probably true " and at
first glance seems odd, considering that offshore outsourcing and SOA
are both among the fastest growing trends in IT. However, this is mostly
because SOA is quite difficult to move offshore. The barriers are
similar to those in front of href="http://www.networkcomputing.com/blog/dailyblog/archives/2007/11/microsoft_oslo.html">SOA
as a service – namely that SOA involves integration of other
systems, most of which are still in-house and onshore. Outsourcing the
middleware only really makes sense if the underlying applications are
outsourced too.

This is likely what ZenSar and SOA Software are betting on. While SOA
itself isn't a great candidate for outsourcing, it should enable
outsourcing of the underlying applications by breaking them up into more
standardized components. That's good for both offshore IT shops and SaaS
providers.

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