SODA and SOBA anyone?

Gartner published a report today for the small and midsized companies (SMB) crowd showing them the light at the end of the SOA tunnel. According to the report, many SMBs find service-oriented architectures to be daunting, but through 2010, over 40% of their investments in new technology will be directly related to deploying SOA and SOBA (service-oriented business applications). Here is how they can benefit:

The development of standards-based Web services will enable SMBs to build, buy and extend service-oriented business applications (SOBAs), which are themselves Web services. Here, techniques used in the service-oriented development of applications (SODA) will come into play, whether the SOBAs are to be developed internally or by external service providers and vendors. Business analysts, rather than IT programmers, may take charge of the development of SOBAs using new application modeling tools included in next-generation business process modeling (BPM) software. This software minimizes the coding element traditionally associated with application creation, while elevating the business-processing aspect.

The idea of business analysts not programmers building applications seems intriguing. With the current market fixation on IT/Business process alignment; this leap is not only the right direction, but it pretty much smoothes out the line between the two for good.