Five ways SOA now powers transformation behind the scenes

To put it in Gartner-speak, SOA has taken its ride across the crest of the hype curve (mid 00s), plunged down into the depths of despair -- I mean trough of disillusionment (late 00s) -- and now motors along, up a five-percent grade, along the plateau of productivity.

In other words, when we talk about service oriented architecture, we're clearly at the let's-roll-up-our-sleeves-and-make-this-thing-work stage.  No press releases, no big blog announcements needed.

In essence, the market emphasis has moved on to new and more shiny things, leaving SOA as the methodology and philosophy behind the scenes making all the new stuff work as it should.

Here are five ways SOA practices continue to power both business and technical transformation behind the scenes:

1) SOA supports the foundation of cloud formations: the success of cloud computing depends on the ability to manage, govern, and orchestrate services coming from IT departments or outside providers.

2) SOA supports the rise of loosely coupled businesses: for maximum agility, today's enterprises need to operate on confederations of services assembled to meet quickly changing process requirements.

3) SOA supports the emerging analytical organization: Data services ensure that information moving through the organization is current and cleansed.

4) SOA is the basis of real-time and complex event processing: In a hyper-competitive global economy, enterprises need the ability to sense and respond quickly. That "two-second" advantage comes from having information and applications organized and accessible across the enterprise.

5) SOA is recasting the IT industry itself: We're already seen plenty of evidence of this. Major enterprise vendors such as Oracle and SAP have shifted their entire business models in the direction of standards-based middleware.