A number of recent announcements indicate that SOA and Web Services have reached a level of high acceptance. But the worry is that the hype in the sector may be running equally high.
A poll taken in May, 2006 of 139 members from the Society of Information Management and presented this week at their SIMposium conference showed that Web Services top the list of items most important to these technologists, with Security dropping back to third place. Last year Web Services didn’t even rank.
This year’s ranking is as follows:
1. Web Services
2. Business intelligence
3. Security
4. Business process management
5. Customer portals
6. Systems integration
Jerry Luftman, the author of the report and SIM Vice President of Academic Community Affairs, attributed the reason for Web Services rising to the top was greater interest in both virtualization and SOA. In the area of virtualization, they see a trend towards thin clients and virtualized servers.
SOA Software is also reporting this week, somewhat reminiscent of McDonald’s “number of hamburgers sold here” advertising, that they have now processed more than 10 billion Web Service transactions for their large enterprise customers.
SOA and Web Services clearly offer a better brand of technology, but it’s not without negatives. They provide a great framework, but the execution/implementation of any technology is often more important to success than the technology used itself. When even the MotleyFool has picked up on SOA and is offering advice for how best to play SOA as an investment, you may begin to wonder if the hype has gone too far.
A backlash to the technology may be coming. An InformationWeek article found a quarter of business tech pros responding that SOA projects fell short of their expectations, and 55% saying that SOA introduced added complexity.
Web Services and SOA are excellent technologies to consider for adoption, but like any other technology, successful implementations require careful planning and analysis.
