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SOA: Back from the Dead?
About a year ago Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group declared that “SOA is Dead; Long live Services!”. Manes wrote that “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.”
Those thoughts sparked a rash of debate and comment, followed by a lull in headline-grabbing attention. SOA didn’t go away, and it still has showed up fairly prominently on people’s radar, but over the last year it has lacked the high-profile hype that it had gotten in earlier years. But that may be changing.
“There are people in the market saying that SOA is over. Nothing is more wrong,” said Ruediger Spies, vice-president of enterprise applications at IDC Central Europe. Spies said that people need to be thinking about SOA for the “long term”. He emphasized the A of SOA stands for ‘Architecture’. “Architecture is not just a project – it’s a project that has to run for some years,” he said.
IDC is reporting that they foresee spending in the Americas will increase 24.7 percent from 2008 through 2013, while Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) will experience a 24 percent growth, and Asia Pacific will see 23.2 percent growth.
The interesting thing happening with this renewed interest in SOA is that the conversation is moving away from a detailed discussion of the internals for how to build SOA to a discussion around how SOA can be used alongside other technologies to solve business problems.
For example, Spies commented that having an SOA architecture makes implementation of BPM simpler. Dr. Alexander Salmarin, author and consultant on BPM, seconded that by saying “In my experience, the best context for SOA is a well-architected BPM.” Vendors are also picking up on the synergies of SOA, BPM and data integration. Another example is a recent press release from Software AG that reads “webMethods Communicate BPM brings together BPM and SOA architecture and integration principals…”.
Maybe the real story here is not that SOA is alive or dead, but that SOA needs to collaborate with other technologies like BPM for itself to be a viable technology.
