Five Reasons Why SOA's Not Dead
Posted by Carlos Bernal on Thu, Feb 05, 2009 @ 08:26 AM
Welcome to WebLayers' new blog "And SOA on and SOA on." What a great time to join the fray, especially during what feels like an interminable eulogy for our close friend SOA. Not the first time I entered a market debate. People laughed when I once said email would become as central a business tool as the phone.
But what really seems to be surfacing about this whole 'SOA is dead thing' is the rather ubiquitous belief that SOA isn't dead at all.
We're not talking 'not dead' as in Elvis being sighted at a roadside diner. We're talking more about SOA having possibly moved on to its next life form.
As Anne Manes was quick to point out, "SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on 'services.'"
This is followed by a slew of industry experts like David Linthicum who posits, "Will SOAs morph into private clouds?" given its crossover from SOA. Not to mention Joe McKendrick's support of this vision as well as Joe's post back in 2007 that questioned whether SOA is effectively Software as a Service. What experienced industry veteran is not an advocate of SAAS as taxonomy these days.
What I'm seeing up close is how SOA is evolving to support cloud computing and Software as a Service -- which makes me realize just how undead SOA is. Here are five more reasons why:
1. SOA companies are still getting funding. 'Nuf said from WebLayers on that.
2. The major players including IBM, HP and Oracle continue to invest resources and deliver products dedicated to SOA. In fact, IBM's latest earnings report that revenues from its middleware products – the heart of SOA - were 5.2 billion, up 4 percent versus the fourth quarter of 2007.
3. SOA projects are still underway; they just haven't been renamed yet.
4. Gartner is due to put out is Magic Quadrant for SOA governance any day now and has recently released two SOA related reports: Application Infrastructure for New Systematic SOA Application Projects and Application Infrastructure for SOA Composite Application Projects that indicate that SOA continues to be a viable initiative in many organizations.
5. It's still a busy beat assignment for the folks over at InformationWeek, eWeek, and Infoworld. Not to mention the comprehensive focus to SOA given by SearchSOA.
And I'm sure there's lots more signs of SOA's life. If you have additional evidence that SOA has not yet left the building, please drop me a line. Let's remember in an economic climate that demands doing more with less, more automation, and serious ROI's...
...the debate can't center around vocabulary it's got to revolve around results.
Jeff