esb « Kunal's Blog

January 7, 2009

What does it mean – “SOA is dead”

Filed under: Service Oriented Architecture — Tags: esb, soa — kunal @ 1:07 pm

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.

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October 29, 2008

Role on an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Post 1

Filed under: Service Oriented Architecture — Tags: BPM, EAI, Enterprise Architecture, esb, soa, web services — kunal @ 3:49 pm

I have been recently finding myself talking to a lot more people then before about the role of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in a SOA. Thus I am starting a series of Blog postings on this topic.

In this first posting, I am merely going to clear the myths around ESB’s and SOA. Subsequent postings will talk about when to use an ESB, common mistakes, ROI, etc etc.

Clearing up some Myths

Myth 1: ESB is SOA or SOA is ESB

You can have an SOA without an ESB. Just like you can have an SOA without a single Web Service. So please do not get caught up by folks (mostly expensive consultants) that say that your SOA is not complete, or not an SOA at all if you don’t use an ESB.

Myth 2: EAI, BPM and ESB

You need all three in your Enterprise is a myth!!! Most large companies probably already have some EAI. Maybe some have BPM also and now yet another middleware layer – ESB. So how do these 3 co-exist. Your defining the role of each of them in your Enterprise Architecture is critical to your SOA success. At a 10K foot level, as you start seeing the product roadmaps for all these products, they seem to have a lot in common. All major EAI and BPM vendors are doing some ESB. All traditional ESB vendors are doing some Web Services Management. ESB’s already do some aspects of EAI and BPM.

Gosh – can this get any more confusing?? Over the next few weeks, I am probably going to devote a complete blog posting, or maybe a brand new blog itself on this topic along!!

Myth 3: You need an ESB as soon as you have external Web Services

This means that you are exchanging information with your vendors or partners using an SOA. Hmmm.. this is probably the first time you should ever considering using an ESB (but that is a topic for a future discussion)…. all i want to point out is that the use of an ESB here is not a mandatory requirement that you should impose on your SOA.

In your experiences you might have encountered several other comments that would equate to “myths” as I am describing them. I just called out a few at the top of my head – but please feel free to respond with the “myths” you have heard with respect to SOA and ESB.

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