Some unabashed predictions for the year ahead in SOA

"We can safely say from reports that have come out in 2006 that somewhere between 10% and 90% of enterprises will be doing SOA."  -Dana Gardner 

For SOA in 2006, there was always something happening, but nothing going on. For 2007, expect more C-level cred, but internal bickering about who, what, when, where, and how. Expect slow, glacially slow -- but nevertheless steady -- adoption. Maybe even more acquisitions. But will vendors start to get bored with the term "SOA"? 

Before the holidays commenced, I once again had the honor and fun of joining a distinguished group of industry commentators, led by Dana Gardner, this time to provide our unabashed predictions on where SOA is going in the year ahead. Joining the panel were Steve Garone, Jon Collins, and Tony Baer. (Audio and transcript available at Dana's BriefingsDirect blog here at ZDNet.)

Dana predicted that 2007 will be "the year of modeling," with "a lot more product and specification and methodology around the modeling of services that can leverage and exploit some of the activity from 2006 around governance and the registry and repository." With this, Dana adds, will come "some much improved tools, graphical tools, and some innovative approaches to how to choreograph -- and that plays into event-driven stuff, too."

Dana also expects more growth of the semantic Web, which "will offer on one hand competition against the SOA messaging and value, but more importantly offer a tag-team approach." The growth of semantic Web, combined with internal efforts, will be "one of the big tipping points for the further adoption of SOA."

Steve Garone of AlignIT Group agreed that 2007 will see the beginnings of SOA build-out, but divisions within organizations will continue to hamper enterprise-wide SOA efforts. "We hear about IT, business analysts, and businesspeople working together to build business processes and then implement them and support them with services. But, little of that is actually going on and being effective within organizations. I hear a lot of folks on both sides of that pointing fingers and claming that the other one doesn’t get it." As a result Garone continued, many SOA efforts remain ground in pilot implementations. "Over 2007, I think you’re going to see some shake-out and some advancement in terms of building that bridge between the organizations that want to do SOA and therefore forming the foundation for moving on, but I don’t quite think we’re there yet." 

Jon Collins of Macehiter Ward-Hutton was slightly more optimistic, agreeing that 2007 will be there year that enterprises embrace SOA -- slowly but surely. "In terms of adoption levels, people aren’t going to suddenly sort of rip out everything that they’ve got and say, 'Let’s paint the whole town SOA.' But there will be more of an understanding of where it can benefit the organization."

Tony Baer of OnStrategies also predicted slow, steady SOA adoption in 2007, with the most dramatic examples confined to "hot spots" within organizations, such as those dealing with the consequences of mergers and acquisitions. But for the most part, rather than attempts at "big-bang" SOA implementations, the vast majority of implementations will take a safer, more "boring" route -- incrementally. "I think the mainstream will incrementally get to the first things beyond the skunkworks stage."

On the vendor side of SOA, 2006 was a year of relentless acquisitions of SOA-focused companies, and Dana also expects more "big SOA-related acquisitions" again in 2007: "I’m going to look to SAP and Oracle as likely candidates for acquiring other companies. The net-net on that is the application guys are going to start to flex their muscles on SOA. If you have both the infrastructure and the applications, and then you produce the SOA benefits, that’s a very advantageous place to be."

As for predictions from yours truly, I opined that perhaps the term "SOA" (but not the concept) will begin to have run its course, and vendors may begin playing up some new themes: "SOA is a very amorphous concept. It’s not a tangible concept, and SOA as a term has crested. It wouldn’t surprise me if we started seeing more vendors move toward some other terminology or other focus in their marketing efforts at the vendor level. Maybe we’re going to be hearing more about EDA, Event Driven Architecture. It has more of an action sound to it. It’s something new, and it has that real-time aspect that ties into business intelligence, and can be integrated well within business intelligence solutions."

(Note to vendors: EDA is fine, but don't start calling it "SOA 2.0"...) 

Another possible term I mentioned that may rise to prominence is Software as a Service, which is what SOA is on an internal basis. Also, "Enterprise 2.0" -- the convergence between SOA and Web 2.0 -- also seems to be catching on.

I also agreed that SOA efforts may get more C-level cred in 2007, but another problem may rear its head -- simply having enough staff to get SOA efforts going. IT budgets are going strong and there's shortages of the right types of skills popping up all over the place. For enterprises that need to keep their day-to-day operations going, it maybe difficult to allocate the human resources to really move SOA projects forward.