SOA gets an obituary

SOA gets an obituary

Burton Group analyst Anne Thomas Manes has declared SOA dead but says that offshoots like mashups and cloud computing remain alive and well By Paul Krill

SOA is dead but services remain alive, according to a prominent analyst who published an obituary for SOA in a blog post on Monday.

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In her blog, Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, pronounced SOA dead.

"SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS cloud computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on 'services,'" Manes wrote.

Instead of becoming a savior, SOA "instead turned into a great failed experiment -- at least for most organizations," Manes said. SOA failed to deliver on promised benefits and after the investment of millions, IT systems are not better than before. In some cases they are worse, with costs higher and projects taking longer, she said.

Interviewed Monday afternoon, Manes said successful SOA implementations have resulted from major IT transformation efforts rather than just slapping a bunch of interfaces on applications. "Those companies have seen spectacular results from these efforts, but in those circumstances, SOA was part of something much bigger," Manes said.

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Companies need to become more in tune with what businesses require and understand what the problems are, she said. What is required is an examination of application architecture rather than project-by-project integration, Manes noted, but with the difficult economy, funding for SOA has dried up, she said.

"All these guys intent on pursuing [an] SOA initiative, they're not going to have any money to do it because the business is not going to continue to fund it," Manes said. In conducting research, she found that the failure of SOA to deliver on initiatives has soured those holding the purse strings.

Still, Manes does emphasize a continuing need for services, such as cloud services. She advised against using the acronym SOA, which has generated a backlash. Instead of people talking about architecture and services, they have focused on such matters as ESBs (enterprise service bus).

"SOA has become a bad word. It must be removed from our vocabulary," she stressed in her blog.

"The demise of SOA is tragic for the IT industry. Organizations desperately need to make architectural improvements to their application portfolios," she wrote. Service-orientation is a prerequisite for rapidly integrating data and business processes and enabling situational development models like mashups. It also is foundational for SaaS and cloud computing, Manes said.

"Although the word 'SOA' is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever," she said. Successful SOA requires disrupting the status quo and redesigning the application portfolio as well as a shift in how IT operates, said Manes.

She cited Bechtel as a company that has had success with services but does not even use the term "SOA."

At IBM, which has been a key vendor in the SOA space, an official on Tuesday morning disagreed with Manes's "SOA is dead, long live services" message.

"I don’t think that is the right message," said Sandy Carter, IBM vice president of SOA and WebSphere strategy. "For me, SOA is alive and kicking moreso than it ever has been in today's economy," she said.

But the marketplace is indeed changing from companies just looking at SOA as a technology to instead focusing on business problems and solving them with SOA, she said.

"We're seeing changes in the marketplace, but I think [these are] changes that are very good," Carter said.

IBM was still seeing its SOA business grow at least as recently as its third quarter, which ended in September 2008, said Carter, noting she could not comment on the fourth quarter because the company is in a "quiet" period. But she acknowledged IT spending overall is being reduced or is flat.

"SOA helps reduce cost and provides business agility, so it really addresses the two biggest concerns going on," she said.

An HP official said companies need to be more in tune with what businesses require and understand application architecture. Funding for technologies that support SOA without a business driver will be very difficult to secure in 2009, said the official, Kelly Emo, SOA product marketing manager for HP Software.

"My response [to the blog] is I think that the issue that really needs to get highlighted in the market is how IT goes about getting funding for their projects in 2009, and I think that's the valuable part of the blog," Emo said.

"What IT has to stop doing is speaking technical jargon to the business. They need to define projects in terms the business cares about," such as emphasizing faster service times and better business processes, she said.

Source: SOA Service Oriented Architecture information at infoworld.com

SOA is architecture with integration

SOA is architecture with integration

Integration by itself has value as a part of architecture, but it's not architecture unto itself.
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The post of the break was one by Joe McKendrick, who says, "SOA is integration. SOA is not integration. Simple as that." In essence, he looks at some of the confusion around the value that SOA brings to the enterprise: Is it integration, agility, or something else? Indeed, there is a renewed debate raging about the relationship between the practices of SOA and integration, according to Joe. He writes:

Agility -- while a commendable goal that everyone needs to shoot for -- is a vague, hard-to-quantify state of existence that SOA-based approaches may or may not be able to accomplish. But the results of integration are often measurable.
At issue is that fact that people want to define SOA more tactically these days. Thus, they want to focus more on the value of the integration byproduct of SOA and not as much on the architectural value of agility. Is this a good thing?

First, let's put things into context. Integration as I defined in my now-aging but popular EAI book, was really presented as an architectural sub-pattern, thus the value of integration within the context of the core strategic direction of the enterprise architecture. In my view, you need both, including defining integration at both the information and service levels (yes, I was talking about SOA in 1996).

First, integration by itself has value as a part of architecture, but it's not architecture unto itself. Indeed, you can have a well-integrated enterprise, but with a crappy architecture that's very difficult to change without breaking a dozen things.

Second, SOA, while also leveraging integration as a sub-pattern -- and integration is a byproduct of SOA -- is really about architecture, or at least it should be. You get to SOA through integration, or more accurately the loose coupling of systems that create and architecture that's easy to change. You can call this agility, changeability, or whatever, but I call it good architecture. Integration indeed has value, don't get me wrong, but the largest value is the ability to get to an SOA, if you ask me. Or, at least to the SOA that's right for your enterprise.

Finally, you can measure the value of agility. I've written on this topic time and time again, and my clients have figured this out time and time again. Some enterprises have huge returns from having an agile architecture, and thus SOA; others not as much, and SOA perhaps should be less of a priority. So, if you can get the value from agility, than leverage integration to get to SOA. Else, leveraging just integration is just fine.

Source: SOA Service Oriented Architecture information at infoworld.com