SOA disillusionment 'cyclical'

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Geneva, 17 May 2007

The discontent with service-orientated architecture (SOA) is at odds with market predictions that see a 50% compound annual growth rate over the next four years, Progress Software technology director, Giles Nelson, says.

"There seems to be a disconnect here between the perception of SOA in the market place and where people are spending money, because they are spending money on this," Nelson says.

"People in the market see SOA as a good thing, [and] it is pretty much the only enterprise architecture game in town," he says, but there is some disappointment with the concept and many early adopters now say it did not meet expectations.

Disillusionment is as old as the software industry itself. "The software industry survives (and arguably thrives) on waves of hype and then the inevitable disillusionment which follows," he says. Gartner has "even formalised this into a diagrammatical view of how a particular software theme evolves over time - they call it the 'Gartner Hype Cycle'," he says.

Many organisations give up on SOA because it appears too big, too complex and too difficult, Nelson says. "Well, it doesn't have to be. Our thesis is there is no SOA 'big bang', or there shouldn't be. It is inappropriate to adopt SOA in that way most of the time," he says. "Incremental adoption is a much better strategy."

Disillusionment is not all bad, Nelson says. Hype is harmful and stripping it away allows enterprise and vendors to find as sensible middle-ground.

Speaking at an SOA "theory in practice" media event, at Divonne-les-Bains near Geneva, Switzerland, Nelson said he believes sensible SOA adoption must be business focused.

"What we mean by that is that you start with a particular business change project, which has got priority from a business point of view and that's going to give you a competitive advantage as an organisation, and you use that as a catalyst to employ technology in an SOA manner."

Manageability is key, Nelson avers. "If you use the right technology and the right principles you can keep your eye on your strategy as an organisation to move to SOA," he advises. "But you do it in bite-size chunks."