The EVERYTHING-SOA Fantasy
I regularly get to hear various vendor pitches on their SOA offerings. It never ceases to amaze me how many pitch their offering as a “complete package”. I usually get the biggest chuckle when a vendor merely dresses up a message involving an app that has existed for year, which magically and all of the sudden has grown SOA-legs simply by saying so (the power of marketing). Give me a break people! SOA can’t be bought like a traditional application.
SOA is an architecture, and you can’t buy an architecture, only the artifacts that implement the architecture. But it’s also a concept that involves specific methodologies, and you can’t package methodologies. In fact, buying traditional applications in the traditional way is actually abrasive to the whole SOA concept, because the concept involves interacting components/services/processes (chunks) from in-house development or external development (vendor or partner based), i.e. disparate teams.
I’m encouraged when I see traditional software vendors service-enable their historically traditional applications (and new ones of course). SunGard fits into this category, and seeing that gives me hope for the future of SOA. There are plenty however, that still don’t get it, and are diluting the whole message and purpose of SOA. I speak with CIO’s in the financial services industry all the time, and there indeed is considerable confusion resulting from the convoluted vendor messages around SOA today.
It must be tempting to buy an EVERYTHING-SOA, software suites from the likes of Oracle, IBM, and SAP because of the illusion that the SOA task can then be checked off the list of “to-do’s”. SOA is all about creating flexible, modular environments meaning you can add or remove services, processes, rules, etc to map to a business need.
Begin with a business need, and let the methodology of service orientation implement the need with agility, as opposed to the other way around (i.e. assuming an off-the-shelf SOA environment will do the trick), the world is just too complicated for an EVERYTHING-SOA, it’s a fantasy.