Monday, January 05, 2009

In a recession its even more about the services

Anne Thomas Manes has obviously taken a decent course in headline writing with her recent post SOA is dead long live services where she says that SOA has been killed by the economic downturn, but that this is a good thing as it means we can concentrate on the services.

Reading between the lines of what Anne writes I think I'd say that her statement is that vendors are moving away from SOA as they've flogged you enough stuff and now they want to flog you its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing. Now in another headline writing award winner Andy Mulholland wrote Innovation is Dead, long live cost cutting which acts as a cautionary tale to those who are hearing vendors claiming that BPM/mashups/SaaS/Cloud will magically reduce costs and solve all ills. The reality is that it is in fact the services that matter more at this stage than at any other.

This doesn't mean that SOA is dead, it means that the marketing fury of T-SOA has moved on as their just aren't that many more ESBs and Web Service tools that you can be sold. What remains is in fact what SOA was all along its Services are the starting point for SOA its not those pretty technologies. I've argued before that Web 2.0 requires SOA so building on the Anne and Andy posts I'd say that simply put.

If you adopt the new technologies without having a services mentality then you will create a degree of mess that will make the one that consultants and vendors got fat on with EAI look like a trivial problem. Doing Spaghetti inside your firewall in big applications is one thing, doing it over the internet and with thousands of small ones is a completely different scale of problem.

So in a recession you need to Identify your services, understand the business value that they deliver, understand the cost model to deliver that value and then decide on the right technology approach.

If that isn't SOA then I don't know what is. So in reality its the "other" SOA that is dead, not the SOA of today.


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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tracksbacks do not seem to work on this blog. Therefore, here is a manual one: http://www.arisblog.com/2009/01/07/technical-soa-is-dead/

Anonymous said...

Is not far better to fix the reason for the failure of SOA instead of just cover the problem (governnce, methodology, etc) ?
Seems that a new name wil not solve the problem.
Read my post : http://www.glaucoreis.com.br/is_soa_dead_i.html

Steve Jones said...

I'm not saying that we change the name, I thought about that for a while but now I've decided that actually it is SOA, namely Business SOA that counts.

The tech crowd are onto CEP, REST, Web2.0, Mashups and whatever they can sell but the fundamentals will be about delivering an IT estate that looks like the business, operates and evolves like the business and is costed in line with the business value it produces.

Jordan Braunstein said...

I just blogged that I think “Big SOA is Dead; Little SOA is Thriving” at: http://tinyurl.com/soa-today2 . Ok, maybe Big SOA isn’t “dead”, but certainly struggling to convince companies to invest in BPM, BAM, ESB (Big SOA) in today’s economic climate is a tough, academic sell when they can go Little SOA with positive ROI. Organizations want rapid results– they want SOA Today and not 6-9 months down the line!