Analyst: 'you'll all be doing SOA in 18 months whether you plan to or not'

eWeek's Darryl Taft is on a tear with all the good stories he's generating out of Microsoft's SOA confab taking place this week.

He quotes Gartner analyst Nick Gall, who stated bluntly that "the frequency and amplitude of business change is increasing, 'and you're all going to be doing SOA in 18 months whether you plan to or not.'"

Quite a contrast from other analysts that said SOA died a horrible death on New Year's Day.

Gall is obviously quite bullish on SOA, noting that the architectural approach delivers value through sharing and reuse, as well as providing greater agility.

What about this prediction that everything will be SOA in a year and a half? Maybe too optimistic -- there will probably be a lot of bits and pieces and islands of service orientation across enterprises. Many organizations will be engaged in JBOWS architecture for some time to come, but this is part of an evolution towards true SOA enablement.

Gall states that SOA will really start to show its worth as it becomes more of a part of business process management (BPM), and vise-versa. "While you can establish an SOA, to build an SOA application you need business and process analysts to design and build the most effective 'close-to-the-business' applications," he said. And conversely BPM is better with SOA, Gall said. "BPM alone is limited," he said. "Older, siloed applications are difficult to integrate with BPM." Yet, services represent the actions that processes coordinate and services ensure consistence across processes."