Prediction: cloudy future threatens SOA vendors

Is this a good time to be an SOA vendor?

Dave Linthicum, who has been both a player and informed observer of the Web services and SOA market over the past decade, predicts that cloud computing will force some SOA vendors out of business over the next year or so. The "inevitable" marriage of SOA and cloud will result in some SOA solutions being exposed as relatively useless. One area vulnerable to the rise of cloud computing -- SOA runtime governance solutions, he says.

It will be interesting to see how much more we'll hear the term "cloud" in place of "SOA" over the coming years. But they will mean the same thing -- delivery and consumption of services from both behind the firewall and across the globe. As Dave put it, "extending your SOA to cloud computing is architecturally not that complex." However, solutions will need to address security, governance, and compliance in new ways.