06/ 8/07

SOA in Israel -- At the Knee of the Adoption Curve

I just returned from a week in Israel working with LogicLibrary's distribution partner, SRL Group. I was impressed with the energy and activity of the Israeli IT community, especially with regards to its interest in and understanding of the value of SOA. I spent time with a wide variety of large enterprises -- banks, insurance companies, defense contractors, software vendors, and government agencies -- and the conversations that took place exhibited a strong grasp of the need for design-time SOA governance. Issues such as how to effectively communicate available services to application developers, how to establish traceability from consumers to consumed services, how to establish effective technical and business architecture/standards governance, and how to deal with the complexity of impact analysis as services within an SOA mature and are versioned were common themes throughout these conversations. Many organizations have completed technical SOA pilots and have deployed an initial set of production-quality services, and they are now grappling with the issues of scaling their SOA initiatives to the broader enterprise. I believe that Israel is on the cusp of an explosion of broad-scale SOA activity, similar to where the U.S. was about a year ago. If the interactions I had this week are an accurate indicator, Israel will soon have numerous examples of successful SOA adoption with strong governance in place -- I'm looking forward to returning six months or a year from now to see these examples in action.