Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group has declared SOA dead as a doorknob! She wrote that “SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on services.”
David Linthicum, SOA evangelist, even agrees that SOA has had problems that include mishandling by big consulting companies, excessive vendor hype, and too few architects and engineers trained in SOA. “Indeed, while SOA is possible, and has a bunch of value, most of those out there tasked to implement SOA were doing so with all the talent of trained monkeys, and just could not get down to the basic issues of architecture, instead focusing way too much on technology and the hype. In short, the efforts were focused in the wrong directions and now there is little to show for it.”
It is likely that many of the concepts behind SOA will simply not go away. And it may be a bit premature obituary. But the drop in the economy has forced many organizations to slam down on spending for new initiatives, and SOA has been one area hit hard. It’s a bit ironic that many of the enabling technologies of SOA that grabbed the spotlight from the architectural idea of SOA survive. Only to be repackaged and repurposed for another day…
