SOA has arrived ... now what?

These days, it has become a bit more quiet around the topic of SOA.

This is very good news. It means, that it has arrived, and people are now taking advantage of service oriented architectures, as opposed to experimenting with it, or debating it. This is a very normal process and the same happened to other hype topics in the past.

Now what? Should we just move on to the next topic "de jour", the next 3- or 4-letter acronym to hype up, and forget about SOA?

I think not.

I think in the next 2 years, especially with the brutal pragmatism imposed all of us in IT by the global economic crisis, it is more important than ever to speak about service orientation. Forget for a minute about the architecture, and focus on where the whole concept came from in the first place.

Service oriented.

For me that implies looking at the business first, at the value your business provides, and how the applications you are running are supporting that value. Once you have clarity around that, you can reap the benefits of service oriented architectures.

If you just talk about SOA, business people will just roll up their eyes, as opposed to their sleeves, and you will not get funding for a project.

I think Software as a Service, On-Demand and cloud computing are the killer application for SOA, and will truly help us along on our joint journey to Software AT your service.

But we all need to talk less about SOA (technology) and more about business services and business value to succeed in making technology more relevant, and significant to any business.

Thats my call to action and new years resolution, what is your's?

Is Middleware a concept of the last millennium?

I would like to kick off my blog with a question.

As software evolves to an online consumption model, is Middleware a concept of the last millennium and will be replaced by an "integration as a service" model? And if yes, by when?

To this point, this does not seem the case, especially in enterprise software. In the enterprise software space, it becomes ever more important to ensure process integrity not just inside the walls of the enterprise, but across the entire value chain. And that "chain" evolves more and more into a true collaborative network, with rapidly changing endpoints and governance models.

But maybe the concepts of Middleware have to be re-thought?

Maybe its no longer about something that sits in the "middle", but something that "surrounds" the processes and provides services to deliver integrity & governance, transport & translation and more.

Maybe Middleware is dead. Maybe this is the age of ServiceWare? ProcessWare?

I look forward to your thoughts and comments on this

CHHO