Outlook for SOA in 2008

3rd January 2008, 07:10 pm

CIO Insight, in a recent posting in their “Future of IT” series, announced that 60 percent of those surveyed for their “Future of IT” survey have said they’ve adopted SOA and web services, and three quarters say it will be “the bedrock of their IT architecture.” However, they are concerned that this last figure is 5% below the survey results of January of last year. One of the potential reasons they cite is the failure to meet the expectation that SOA will save companies money, among other things.

I believe that, to a certain extent, SOA has been over-hyped. As a sales person I recognize that what I sell is not for everyone; SOA is not for everyone either. Architecting an overarching SOA architecture, with an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and all enterprise applications connected to the ESB so that ad-hoc applications can be built “on-the-fly” from the functionality of these enterprise apps, is for large enterprises. And it’s not for every large enterprise either. There are large companies with dozens of different geographical locations or departments where it doesn’t make sense for all applications to be connected under a SOA umbrella.

And gone are the days when large, 12-18 month enterprise projects are the way to go; the success of Salesforce.com vis-a-vis Siebel is ample evidence of that. In my world, companies large and small contact me for tactical point-to-point integrations. If their project works out well with my product, then they’ll roll it out as part of a larger product and buy more of my product. And it works. They didn’t have to marshal dozens of people and put together new teams and come up with new strategic IT and Business initiatives and get everybody aligned with the business and IT goals and disrupt what they were currently doing so that their companies could embark on these huge monolithic projects. A small team of go-getters just “got it done.”

So I’ll get off my soap box now, but I think that companies are starting to see that SOA is not for everyone.