SOA is supposed to finally align business with technology - as William Mougayar of Aberdeen Group counsels.
Daryl Plummer, one of the smartest Gartner analysts, continues the business tone and summarizes in an Optimize article the state of SOA as follows
" Web services, in the context of the evolving Web, may well provide the next revolution in how businesses and people use technology. I see a shift away from installation and products, as seen in enterprise-SOA efforts. Instead, I see the focus on people and processes—how customers or employees use the technology—becoming more important. And this emphasis is where the real value of Web services will lie."
But there is caution there - and when Daryl pauses many CIOs do too.
Then I read this James Governor post about Daryl's comments - WSDL, ebXML.....not the kind of language which makes business executives align with their CIOs. A few weeks ago James posted feedback from one of his readers about the "SOA acronym soup"
And I read Randy Heffner of Forrester, in probably the understatement of the year, calling IBM's SOA "rich, but complex" as it packages 13 (not a typo) WebSphere and Tivoli products.
And I see Consulting Magazine reporting "SOA promises to bring back the demand for IT professional services just like the good ole days, like client/server computing, like the e-Business frenzy"
And I read Chris Koch of CIO magazine ask about Oracle's Fusion application strategy: "But if SOA really takes over, how anxious will those CIOs (at Oracle's customers) be for upgraded versions of software they already own? SOA bodes for keeping old software infrastructure around longer."
And I hear SAP's Shai Agassi, who has been aggressively pitching SAP's own SOA, acknowledge that less than half its customer base will be on its SOA even by 2010.
Daryl, James, Randy, Chris, Shai are some of the sharpest minds in the industry but I am still hearing lots of fundamental questions - and hearing about multi-year projects, lots of external consulting services, more technology jargon.
In the meantime, in the Valley, young (and old) kids, oblivious to all these weighty questions are writing their own SOA in very small letters - in mashup camps.
So here are my questions to big, enterprise-wide SOA. Where's the revolution? And the alignment?
We may need canoes to link our islands of applications and data. Instead we are building a big boat. The Titanic.
Update: Charles Zedlweski has a nice response on enterprise SOA where he explains that SOA becomes more interesting as services - like Lego pieces - proliferate. I respond with my questions on his blog.
