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10/12/06

Reusable Services -- Are They Really "Too Hard" to Create?

We seem to have entered into the naysayer zone with respect to service reuse within an SOA. I guess it's to be expected, as being controversial is one of the best ways to get attention in this noisy world of ours. However, I have to strongly question whether you can consider something an SOA if at least some of the services deployed into that SOA are not reusable/reused. Otherwise, we are back to A Bunch Of Services (ABOS) -- yet another layer of technology that might be fun to work on but doesn't really provide the expected business value.

I'm not alone in this view -- for those of you interested in some real world examples of reusable services, I suggest you take a look at Dave Chappell's recent post on the topic...

10/ 5/06

SIs and SOA -- A Good Thing (Mostly)

You know that a technology trend is "for real" when the major SIs build initiatives around that trend. Just looking back at the SI landscape over the past few months here's a small sampling of SOA-related announcements:

  • Accenture to invest $450M in SOA (July 19, 2006)
  • Organizations Look to Service-Oriented Architecture For Transformation and Innovation, Says Capgemini Survey (June 6, 2006)
  • New IBM Software and Services Accelerate Business Use of Service Oriented Architectures (October 3, 2006)

Of course, this list isn't meant to be comprehensive and I'm sure that I've left plenty of SI-related SOA activity out -- my point is that the technology services world is heavily focused on SOA as "the way forward". That is good news to those of us who have been living in the SOA world since its inception (maybe even all the way back to SOAP 1.1 in May of 2000 if you care to dig back into the archives that far). When SIs take a technology seriously, two really good things happen:

  1. Mainstream technology consumers start evaluating and adopting that technology in house
  2. Best practices for the technology are codified and become SOP (Standard Operating Procedure for those who aren't into TLAs) over time

Of course, the downside of such attention being paid to a technology is that marketing games increasingly come into play at an even higher level, creating FUD and confusion in the marketplace. We have been living with this in the SOA world for some time now as the early technology providers have been sorting out their product positioning, partnerships, etc. -- with SIs entering the game the stakes become even higher. However, I believe the positive far outweighs the negative and I for one am happy to see this level of engagement by the major players. My company, LogicLibrary, is also happy to participate at this higher level within the SOA space -- in fact just yesterday we announced a reseller agreement with IBM Global Services.

I'm sure there are some SOA purists out there bemoaning the fact that SOA is being taken over by the marketing giants. That is exactly the wrong attitude to take -- we should be overjoyed to see SOA become mainstream, while keeping an eye out for the overhype that will inevitably occur.