Failed already? We’ve only just started!
Posted by Russell Plummer on 14 January 2009
In software
As 2009 starts we are all predicting what we think the coming year holds in store for us, this Blog being no exception. However, there is a trend in the predictions that has grown to full scale articles concerning The Demise of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). It feels like it was only a few months ago that we were being told how SOA was the next big thing in computing & that we would all be doing it soon.
For those of you are interested, Service Oriented Architecture is about decoupling the software components that we use from each other so that in future we can more quickly mix & match the applications we use to create useful tools that help our businesses.
Quite frankly though, it doesn’t matter what SOA is, it’s the turnaround in the commentary that I’m more concerned about. Most of the commentary I’ve seen focuses on two aspects:
Firstly that take up of SOA principals has been very slow and thus the inertia isn’t building up as expected. Apparently we expected most organisations to throw out all of their systems and completely re-implement their systems using SOA…hmmm? What has actually happened is that most businesses who are using SOA have implemented smaller projects so haven’t realised the full benefits.
Secondly the economic downturn means we can’t afford to re engineer everything to SOA, and cloud computing will take over anyway.
It may be me just being grumpy, but from a business perspective I would find it extremely difficult to justify spending a lot of money on throwing away things that work for my business; and then replacing them with other things that work in the same way SOA or not. Surely that applies to any size of organisation? What makes more sense is that when a business is looking at making a change, then at that point the principals of SOA may be applied by the IT providers, and that most of the business won’t really care as long as what it gets is better for the business as a whole than what was there before.
To me, I’d say that the whole SOA piece is very much alive & well, but evolving. In this way we see that businesses are taking steps to implement tools on a project by project basis which may well introduce SOA over a long period of time, and when the next round of business iteration comes along then the long term benefits of SOA are realised – which funnily enough is where the commentators are saying that SOA has failed.
Our much vaunted Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (“SaaS”) actually relies on SOA to deliver much of what it does, so “Cloud” will replace “SOA” as the visible artifacts that business see.
It’s quite valid for us to want to know about “The next big thing”, but we also need to keep in mind that change actually takes a lot longer on the whole that the commentators would have us believe. In real world timescales we’re still building up a head of steam.
Just because something hasn’t changed lock, stock & barrel in the blink of an eye doesn’t mean it is lost, just that pragmatic business sense is actually winning.
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Loading ...Tags: economic downturn, SaaS, Service Orientated Architecture, SOA, software
