Burton Group’s Anne Thomas Manes recently was quoted as saying that “an awful lot of companies are really not ready to do SOA“. SOA is not so much about technology as it is “how you think about the problem”.
But vendors may not be heeding that advice. Many vendors push the technology without really trying to understand the business problem and how SOA can be appropriately applied to solve it. This flavor of SOA vendor technology has been labeled as JBOWS (Just another Bunch of Web Services). So many vendors are narrowly focused on the technology that they totally forget the business purpose their software is intended to address. David Linthicom advises that “vendors need to teach as well as to sell”.
A big problem is that people still fail to draw the distinction between SOA and Web Services, and that often leads into a trap of concentrating too much on the technology rather than understanding the business details. While SOA is about creating IT infrastructure that helps address business problems and processes, Web Services center around the technology of transmitting, receiving and interpretting the data.
ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg warns that “there remain many organizations who are attempting to implement SOA, but do little more than implement Web services instead, ending up with redundant, incompatible, and often unmanaged services that have nothing to do with architecture.”
