More music to the ears of SOA enthusiasts

A few weeks back, I pointed to an analogy of SOA functioning as an "iTunes" store for enterprise apps. Kudos to Fundtech's George Ravich for making such a great analogy. He noted at the time that “the SOA service catalog promises to have the same impact on enterprise computing as the iTunes playlist has had on listening to music.” (For the record, a reader pointed out that Fiorano's Atul Saini may have originally coined the iTunes analogy back in 2006. Either way, I wish I could have thought of it!)

Now, in a follow-up post in the Financial Times, George has changed his tune -- no, make that format. He has given equal time to the MP3 crowd, equating service oriented architecture to an MP3 playlist.

"Services-Oriented Architecture offers the ability for non-technical business users to build new products and services by picking and choosing from existing processes contained within an SOA services catalog. An SOA services catalog promises to have the same impact on enterprise computing as the MP3 playlist has had on listening to music."

That is, no more manual handling of vinyl records to listen to the songs you want to hear. It's all digitized on a device or system. And whether you listen to iTunes or MP3, it doesn't matter -- it's about the service, not the technology.