SOA - Dead or alive

I had doubted SOA hype years ago in this post about SOA hype. Recently a small storm was raised when Anne Thomas Manes of Burton group blogged about untimely demise of SOA. But curiously, I am not so pessimstic anymore. My feeling is that SOA as an arhcitecture style is now better understood for what it is, than a magic technology silver bullet intended to solve all of enterprise IT problems. This short post from Ali is quite insightful in that context. What it is suggesting is that SOA has moved on to next step on its evolutionary path. Which is a good sign.

I always believed the true value proposition for SOA was not sharing (a.k.a. reuse) of services, and definitely not cost reduction. As sharing is important for provider who has mass consumers adding further value to digitised services provided. In enterprise scenario this may not be of much importance, unless you are in business of provision of digitised services. But sharing was a necessary step before SOA moved on to next stage of evolution where it makes more sense for enterprises, which are not in business of providing digitised services to masses for further value addition.

This is because sharing of services requires service contract standards(WSDL) and service discovery standards(UDDI) albeit in weak form. It also needed mechanism, to determine what is to be shared and at what granularity, to be established. These standards and technologies are in place and mature now. With these in place, implementing shared service is quite straight forward. It also set stage for next step of this evolutionary journey.

The next step of evolution, viz. flexible services where flexibility is at hands of providers, is progressing as I am blogging. The charge is led incidentally by progress made in BPM world. The more we know about processes, process composition and orchestration especially in a human task centric processes, we will make more progress on flexibility aspet. It would throw up its own set of standards and technologies, e.g. BPMN, Services Fabric based on industry models etc. So having process standards and technologies create need for limited sharing of services, which now can be provisioned using standards and tools in place already. At this stage benefits of SOA start becoming visible for enterprises. It would show up as agile and flexible processes. Processes which can be measured, monitored and flexed easily. When this becomes mainstream then stage will be set for ultimate goal of SOA, viz. flexibility at hand of consumer (a.k.a virtualisation).

I believe for virtualisation to become mainstream we would need ability to procure, provision & manage services in a location independant manner(a.k.a. in the cloud). We would need some form of semantic compatibility guarantees on the fly (kind of expected in semantic web). At this stage of evolution we may also see an ITIL like methodology evolving for business service management. I also believe it is not necessary for all services to be virtualised. What services need to be virtualised in what context would remain a very specific decision for each organisation. (Or you end up finding your business getting disintermediated using the services provided by you).

So don't let all the doom and gloom news get on to your nerves. It may be just current economic climate reflecting in people's feelings. It may not be possible anymore just to declare an IT project as 'SOA' and get funding from business. But from an enterprise architecture viewpoint SOA looks well set to be de-facto architectural style of IT in future.