SOA and cloud Achilles heel: too much success

In a new interview with Loraine Lawson, Dion Hinchcliffe, also a fellow contributor here in at ZDNet, reflected on the issues that tend to slow down or muddle up service technology and delivery, both inside and outside enterprise walls.

First, Dion points out that SOA in the enterprise "didn't take off." But why not?  Often, it may not be for lack of popular support -- it may be due to lack of financial commitment from upper management. He cites the dilemma for human resource departments, which tend to be the first department that deploys SOA-aware services -- such as employee project assignments -- across enterprise walls:

"When you open that HR system up, all of a sudden someone goes to HR and says, 'You need to buy a lot more Oracle licenses and $60,000 in CPUs because everyone in the organization is now using this data a lot.' And they go, 'But why should we pay for that? Why does our budget have to pay for supporting the usage for across the organization?'”

So it's not that the SOA is abandoned by the enterprise; the problem in many cases, then, is SOA is too successful. In fact, Dion adds that he's "been on two large SOA efforts where they would shut down HR participation because they didn’t want to be in the 24-hour service business."  This may be an issue for private cloud services as well -- someone has to pay for services that the rest of the enterprise uses.