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2005-2015: the decade of SOA!

With apologies to our fellow ZDNet bloggers who may want to lay claim to 2005 for their own technology spheres, we have word from some industry movers and shakers that 2005 will belong to SOA. That's right, the year 2005 will be "The Year of SOA," said Eric Marks, founder of AgilePath and co-author of Executive's Guide to Web Services and Business Darwinism Evolve or Dissolve, in a recent interview with KnowledgeReports.
Written by Joe McKendrick, Contributing Writer
With apologies to our fellow ZDNet bloggers who may want to lay claim to 2005 for their own technology spheres, we have word from some industry movers and shakers that 2005 will belong to SOA. That's right, the year 2005 will be "The Year of SOA," said Eric Marks, founder of AgilePath and co-author of Executive's Guide to Web Services and Business Darwinism Evolve or Dissolve, in a recent interview with KnowledgeReports. (Other IT thought leaders have also said as much.)

Marks cites Yankee Group data that shows 75 percent of firms planning to invest in SOA in the next 12 months, as well as his own evidence. "As I'm working in the field, and talking with executives in a lot of companies, they're validating that there is a major movement to budgeting SOA and Web services-related initiatives next year. It's basically going to be investing in the whole lifecycle of SOA, whether it's a few Web service projects, or a couple of pilots, or starting out with a strategy and rolling out into a major enterprise initiative."
Whoa! Time out!
Many Web services projects are just getting out of the starting gate, and being applied to Web applications and other edge-of-the-enterprise projects. They're only just starting to touch the core mission-critical systems that run our business. There seems to be an awful lot of confusion out there about the difference between Web services and SOA. You can have a thousand Web services, but that does not an SOA make.
Marks admits just as much: "There's a difference between doing an SOA strategy and implementing it. I don't know of anybody who's been able to implement SOA enterprise-wide in one cut. Normally, it's a very phased initiative. It's a long-term thing, a definition of and commitment to policies and standards and other things you need to implement over some time horizon."
The bottom line, 2005 will be the year of SOA. And 2006. And 2007. And 2008... You get the picture.
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