SOA 2.0, not there yet?

Posted by TomRose on June 11, 2006 under SOA | Be the First to Comment

Don’t have SOA 2.0 yet, that’s great! Don’t go there as it’s little more than marketing material than any evolution to service oriented architecture. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is really not a new concept. If you look back to what was called Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) or how software engineers built software since as long as I can remember, what we strived to build were services at many levels. So what has changed? Standards for integration, messaging, and orchestration are driving most of real value around creating and consuming services. For example integration is being achieved by Web Services providing technology independent mechanisms to publish business and technology services. This has helped create a common language to communicate about designing, implementing, publishing, and consuming services, as well as the benefit to creating services to drive business value. Where is the business value? Seamless communication across the business for customers, business partners, and staff, as well as maximizing the ability for change throughout the enterprise, is where the value of SOA exists.

Because of the standards, and now the firm SOA message that is being communicated, vendors wanted to create SOA products. We have the birth of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as a product, and for the most part ESB is a stack of technologies that support an SOA approach, great in and of itself, although ESB is not the complete picture for SOA implementation. What services get exposed, granularity of their interface, service semantics, service orchestration, etc. all makes up SOA. SOA 2.0 is now the addition of event-driven architecture (EDA) to what we now understand to be SOA. Event-driven architecture is best enabled by a SOA approach, and that’s great. However, every time we find a good use for SOA and create a product around it, throwing another version to the acronym does little more than add confusion to what businesses should be focused on when understanding what makes up SOA, and why it’s good for their business.

I understand the concept of SOA 2.0, as software vendors must strive to differentiate their products to stay alive to give us these great products in the first place. However, lets utilize the momentum SOA has in the industry to continue to define standards, create products, and educate our business leaders to the value of an integrated adaptive enterprise. Let’s not derail it with trying to hype it to 2.0 before we have launched SOA into a stable orbit around our little blue world.

As so elegantly said, “please sign the petition and stop the madness!“