Another view: 'Magic number' for SOA services threshold is 'nuts'

Miko Matsumura, VP of marketing at webMethods, took issue with a recent post in which I relayed an opinion that '50' seems to be the threshold at which Web services may require some better care and feeding, with governance, registry, management, and all that good stuff.

Robert Meyer of TIBCO observed in a recent podcast that he has observed that "SOA efforts fall into confusion once a company has several development teams and about 50 services built. That’s also the point where there are too many services for informal management. Once companies hit this number, they quickly can lose the benefits of SOA unless they take time out to set up SOA governance."

Miko's response to this threshold: "Nuts." He observed that "a lot of people define services at different levels of granularity, therefore some companies that have smaller numbers of services may need governance capabilities sooner. Having a magic number like that smacks to me of dangerous and vague advice and frankly seems silly."

As Miko put it:

"Institute governance as soon as the services you deploy actually matter to your business. This can be as early as your first service, depending on granularity and on whether the service is low value or high value (mission critical)."