By now you have surely read a lot of stuff about SOA being declared dead as of Jan 1st, 2009. Hmm.. what does that mean?
Does it mean all SOA projects have come to a stand still?
Does it mean that the principles that SOA preached are no longer viable?
Does it mean that technologists will stop working on SOA enabling products and solutions?
Does it mean standards organizations will not create more standards around Web Services, ESB, etc?
Does it mean that ESB is dead?
This and a hundred other questions come to mind when someone makes a statement like “SOA is dead”.
My 2 cents for those who might care – SOA in its traditional form is dead – and by that I mean that the large multi million dollar SOA projects are dead. The concept and architectural principles preached by SOA are only becoming more and more relevant. 2009 and 2010 should see the emergence of true SOA architects and business analysts who know how to implement SOA in less time and money.
I have always preached that any “SOA” project with a price tag of over 250,000 is a failed SOA project. If you just use a quarter million dollars as a threshold, you are forced to scope projects that have to quickly demonstrate ROI and are 6-9 months in duration.
The key mistake around SOA has been projects that have implemented a millions dollars of technology with 5-7 services sitting on top of it. Of course, SOA would be considered DEAD if that were to continue into 2009.
SOA is not dead – people who understand SOA are getting smarter about implementing it – or should get smarter about implementing it.
I can agree that the acronym SOA is now tainted, and someone should give us another TLA (three letter acronym) that represents the fundamentals of SOA.
