SOA rising from the ashes; even Burton Group says so
Burton Group (now part of Gartner) has just issued a report signifying that the concept of service oriented architecture is rising from the ashes. It was Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group that issued the proclamation at the beginning of 2009 that "SOA is Dead; Long Live Services."
Network World's Maxwell Cooter picked up on the latest announcement about SOA's resurgence, noting that Burton VP Chris Howard says there has been a growing business focus to SOA efforts -- and the rise of cloud computing has also injected new life into SOA efforts. As we've said here at this blogsite, effective cloud computing requires SOA underneath. (Howard's report is titled The Lazarus Effect: SOA returns, but you need to be a Burton client to access it.)
To quote from the Network World article:
"SOA projects failed because there was too much concentration on the technology and because, in the financial climate of the past few years, major transformational projects were canned but that's set to change again, said Howard. In particular, the emergence of cloud computing is set to lead to a new boost for SOA. 'To achieve the goals of a hybrid data center with processes spanning the internal/external boundary, service orientation is a prerequisite.'"
Cooter even cites the creation of the SOA Manifesto in the fall of 2009 as evidence of a renewed focus on the business benefits of service orientation. It's no accident that Anne Thomas Manes was one of the authors and intellectual forces behind the Manifesto.
My colleague Dave Linthicum also picked up on the new proclamation, observing (and I agree) that many people simply looked at the preamble headline of Anne's post ("SOA is Dead: Long Live Services"), and didn't look deeper into the essence of what she was trying to say. That is, service orientation should be part of everything we do, but don't get hung up trying to build an "SOA program." Dave also chides the "junk technology being hyped as 'SOA'" -- at least $2 billion worth of hype -- which didn't do much to service-orient anything. Focus on SOA fundamentals, and you won't go wrong with enterprise architecture or cloud computing, he says.