At the beginning of this year Anne Thomas Manes wrote in her blog "SOA has become a bad word. It must be removed from our vocabulary".
She said that SOA turned into a great failed experiment and did not deliver it expected benefits. Almost half a year later it’s time to check whether we really removed this word from our vocabulary. Let’s have a look at Google trends and compare software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing and SOA.
This looks like there is still a viral interest in SOA.
I know that this is not really a criterion whether SOA is dead or not, but it shows that SOA is not overhyped any longer and comes into a phase where people really understand the core concepts of the topic.
What else can we learn from the Google trend graphic? Although the news reference volume published about SOA is stagnating, the search volume almost kept stable. This much follows Gartner's hype cycle, which basically consists of 5 phases. I think we are now in phase four which is entitled “Slope of enlightenment”. That means although the press has stopped to discuss the topic, some business continues and starts to understand the benefits and practical application of the hyped topic.
When do you think will SOA reach the fifth phase called “Plateau of Productivity” or do you think I am completely wrong and I am just seeing the ghost of SOA.
If you are interested in my follow-up blog post, please read my new post It's all about services.
I think you are spot on...
Gartner agrees with you and puts SOA on the slope of enlightenment as of July 2008. It may be further up the slope. As Frank Kenney says, without SOA Governance you wont see the plateau of productivity.
Another Gartner analyst, Paolo Malinverno says "Lets face it, SOA is inevitable".
I think Anne's blog about "SOA is Dead" was widely misinterpreted, and I say this having worked with Anne for the past half dozen or so years. We are giving back to back talks at Burton Catalyst conference in San Diego 2009 at the end of July on --guess what SOA.
So SOA is alive and well... just adapting to the times alongside everythign else...
Best,
Miko
Hi Miko,
thanks for your comment!
I also think SOA is inevitable. Primarily if you think about the heavily discussed topics as cloud computing and saas (see also my comment in my other blog post It's all about services).
SOA is simply an architectural style and cloud computing can help to realize such an architecture.
SOA in combination with EA should help companies to understand their own architectures which I think is a precondition to reasonably use the cloud and outsource services.
What do you mean?
Cheers,
Jens
