SOA - what exactly are we talking about?

Submitted by Ivo Totev. Business Analysts

What was it I recently read in the press? An ERP company's user group survey revealed that only a small percentage of its clients were involved with SOA. This immediately prompted the question - is SOA real or just a lot of hype with no substance?

What had happened? The company's marketing department had decided to give a new name to its SOA strategy, "Enterprise SOA". Had they been a little more precise and called it "Enterprise Resource Planning SOA", there would probably have been no cause for discussion at all. For in this case, it would have been clear to everyone that this SOA meant some kind of large-scale project - namely major software re-design. By the way, this is not a particularly simple job achievable in a day; it applies to all large-scale projects, even the Airbus 380. Large-scale projects like these all have something in common - the client takes on a passive role. Whether we all will be flying in an Airbus 380 in a few years' time or deploying an entirely SOA-based ERP depends on how good are the particular companies' project teams. All we can do is sit back and cross our fingers that everything will go well, making the reservations of the user group mentioned earlier quite understandable.

However, there are other ways SOAs are used. For example, Organisations approach the topic of how they can better the interaction between IT and business and, against the background of this improved interaction, what governance and the life cycle of a SOA should look like. Every week I see projects being brought to a successful conclusion within a matter of a few weeks. In these cases the functionality of existing systems was encapsulated into services - setting up a new generation of enterprise mash-ups and consequently increasing productivity, shortening process duration and introducing the advantages of Web 2.0 into the company. We are not talking here about large-scale projects, but more about those pragmatic solutions that are so very much sought after by the various specialist departments. The category for this really ought to be called "Quick ROI SOA".

No matter how you view it, discussing just SOA by itself, without being more specific, can be more or less like comparing apples with oranges. It's now time to start putting SOA into thematic categories - then everyone will know what is actually being talked about. One consequence would be that people would finally stop questioning the prospects of success of a lightweight "Quick ROI SOA" - too many of them have already proved their worth. Another - some analysts would no longer be able to forecast the death of ERP due to SOA, but rather, at best, the death of "Enterprise Resource Planning SOA" caused by SOA. In this case, however, everyone can see what little sense this makes.