The South East Asia SOA Weblog

Unless you have had your eyes closed for 3 or 4 years you will probably have noticed a number of very negative articles written in the online press and blogs etc. regarding SOA being DOA (dead on arrival) along with a general bagging of the vendor community for selling the IT industry a lemon with SOA. A good example is a recent blog article by Anne Thomas Maines of Burton Group on January 5 2009 http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2009/01/soa-is-dead-long-live-services.html. There are many others… just google “SOA DOA".

I find this mentality hard to rationalize given the potential benefits of SOA when done right and the fact that IT transformation needs to be a committed path for any organization and not just a short project. It is a shame that people are often openly negative about technologies so late in the hype cycle (…when SOA is approaching the plateau of productivity).

Many of these types of articles proclaim that SOA is dead on arrival due to the complexity of the underlying technologies and the high barriers to adoption etc.. Granted, there are some reasonably complex technologies underlying SOA but these technologies have been formulated in a layered manner so as to ease the burden on organizations and allow for prodigious reuse of the underlying infrastructure. They all have a very specific purpose. Gone are the simple day of client-server (which was hard enough for the community to digest at the time). Gone are the early days of the internet boom where HTML and Javascript were the IT industries bread and butter. We now have a vast array of layered point technologies at our disposal for developing unbelievable applications.

Many new and valuable technologies which have been loosely grouped under the banner of SOA are extremely valuable in their own right and solve many of the historical problems that IT has been confronted with in both enterprise and B2B integration along with implementing business process management.

One thing that many of the articles I have read fail to recognize is that “SOA” technologies are now embedded in most of the new enterprise applications offered by vendors and the open source community both simplifying integration of these applications and providing an extremely open and extensible enterprise IT platform. Now surely that is a significant benefit!!

In my 27 or so years of IT experience I have found that most new technologies have their place and some value for a time. It is just a matter of understanding that value at the right time in the cycle and putting it to work for you the right way. For example even CORBA is still at work for you (under the hood of J2EE as the transport mechanism for EJB. CORBA is one technology that many refer to as dead but it is the one sure fire way of integrating EJB transport across multiple vendor stacks (as opposed to trying to implement T3 bridges etc. to cope with disparate transport implementations).

Next thing we will see people in the community going negative on Web 2.0, RIA and Cloud Computing (which by the way has no fixed standards yet). If they think SOA was difficult then they should try some of these technologies on for size. New technologies need hard core architects and developers not hard core IT journalists to get successful…