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SOA is a Long Tail Enabler?
Chris Anderson coined the term ‘The Long Tail’ in a Wired magazine article of October 2004. The idea is that being able to sell just a few copies of each of many products having low demand or low sales volumes can be just as profitable as selling many copies of a single blockbuster product. Anderson sees the Internet, because of its reducing storage and distribution costs as being an enabler of The Long Tail sales strategy, being able to provide wide selection of many niche-value items.
An article by ZapThink‘s Ronald Schmelzer notes that IT moved from centralized mainframe model to a decentralized client/server one and then back to a centralized model based around the web. But Web 2.0 and technologies like SOA and Web Services with more participatory and collaborative capabilities can push the overall computing model back towards decentralization.
In this model, individual business units can easily sponsor and pay for low-cost Web Services that expose niche interest information while centralized IT continues to spend the bulk of their resources on ‘best sellers’. Tools and products to publish and consume Web Services are making it easy for business units to create specialized data mashups tuned to their niche needs.
Schmelzer predicts application development to gradually move from being the responsibility of a centralized IT to one that is shared by different groups throughout the enterprise. The role of IT then shifts to one of governance and standardization of the components and business processes that emerge and maintainer of overall infrastructure. He sees this trend as changing the way budgets are defined and projects are managed, developed and deployed.
One example for how this is unfolding are Web Service-enabled content repositories like that offered by Formek. Business units can publish their unique documents and other content securely both internally and externally. Content-based Web Services can be set up to provide data feeds that can be consumed and channeled into portals and business processes within the enterprise.
