Gary Barnett's Blog

I’ve enjoyed this past week’s chatter about the current state of SOA, while much of the discussion has been a combination of punditry and publicity seeking with relatively little actual content inserted in order to justify the different propositions, there have been a couple of fab posts – notably from a set of analysts I particularly like and admire – Bloor, Governor and Ward-Dutton (in alpha order).
So I thought I’d add my two pennorth.

Essentially – this is what I have to say -

• Saying “SOA is Dead” is as meaningful as saying “Art is dead”
• It is either misleading or foolish (or both) to state that SOA is dead
• Giving up on architecture just because it’s a “chore” is the road to failure…
• If SOA is dead, then Web 2.0 is dead
• The good news, though, is that SOA is as fit as a fiddle
• The bad news is that if you want to succeed, you have to be willing to make an effort
• We have a simple choice: get it right, or do it all over again

The uncompressed version..

The chatter was kicked off by a blog entry by Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton group who announced that SOA is dead. Indeed, she goes so far as to give a date of death (1/1/09).
As it happens a close read uncovers the fact that Manes doesn’t think that “SOA the concept” is dead, it’s the acronym that’s dead. It seems that her message is that SOA isn’t dead, but that when talking to the business people we should be “talking about concrete things (like services) and concrete architectural practices (like application portfolio management) that deliver real value to the business.

I have to admit, reading the post gave rise to a couple of knee-jerk responses -

1. If you really think it makes sense to say that SOA is dead, then there’s a pretty high likelihood that you don’t actually understand the role of architecture in good software or that you’re just trying to create a bogus chunk of FUD.
2. If you think that it’s the “term” SOA that’s at fault, and have just discovered that the business wants to hear tangible business benefits rather than abstract architectural approaches – Then you’re about 5 years behind the times in your thinking about SOA. Some of us (MWD Advisors, RedMonk, Zapthink, and Me) have been saying this for years.
3. If your problem really, really, is with the acronym , given that we all seem to agree vigorously that we need an architectural approach that is service oriented, why the hell not use the letters “S”, “O” and  “A” to describe it. Is it likely that a new acronym will make things easier or better? For my part, the really handy thing about the SOA acronym is that really does cover the bases of Service orientation and architecture.

So here’s my take… I’ll start with a couple of snippy comments, then get into the meat of what I think is “up” with SOA.
First…

Saying “SOA is Dead” is as meaningful as saying “Art is dead”

Saying “SOA is Dead”  is as meaningful as saying “Architecture is Dead” or “Art is dead”. It’s the sort of statement that has more use opening a late night bourbon fuelled ramble than a serious discussion about what hard pressed IT professionals ought to be doing.

To follow this by saying  “SOA will be replaced (or ’survived’) by mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on ’services’.” heaps more absurdity onto the proposition. Mashups depend on a service oriented architectural approach. Indeed, as Mr Governor points out – the entire web depends on a service oriented architectural approach.

Manes is a smart analyst, who has made many important contributions to the discussion around and thinking about SOA, but I think this particular addition to the mix wasn’t one of her best.

It is either misleading or foolish (or both) to state that SOA is dead

It’s particularly irresponsible for an analyst do make a pronouncement like this. Analysts have a duty to help people succeed, not to encourage them to give up. Instead of saying “kill the acronym” how about providing some guidance about how it should be pitched internally?

Another slightly irritating element of the discussion surrounding SOA is a subtext that seems to run along the lines of “Architecture is really difficult to get right, so let’s just drop it”. Don’t talk about the”A” in SOA. Let’s all just deny the existence and need for architecture, and focus on the good stuff.

Giving up on architecture just because it’s a “chore” is the road to failure…

Architecture is pivotal to the success of service based IT. It’s not a “nice to have”, it’s a fundamental necessity. Unless we as an industry make a real commitment to architecture we’re doomed to continue to make the same mistakes we’ve been making for decades.
Take mash-ups, as an example – Sure, you can quickly assemble some fantastic apps by simply grabbing some javascript and coding away. But there are big, big, disappointments in store for mash-up builders who assume that because it’s cool and new they don’t need to think about all those boring questions that a mature approach to architecture helps you to answer (Reliability, security, availability, scalability, re-use etc etc).

If SOA is dead, then Web 2.0 is dead

In 2002 I predicted that 80% of SOA projects in the enterprise would fail to meet expectations – precisely because of our unwillingness to think about architecture. I then went on to sell the idea of “Architecture” and tried to show clients how they should begin to think about it and do it.

The same can be said with 100% confidence of Mash-ups. People who evangelise Mash-ups and Web 2 dot oh without pointing out the importance of getting the foundation right are encouraging the community to make a series terrible and expensive mistakes.

The fact that “Architecture” is hard should ring alarm bells… but instead, rather than eating our greens we go straight to the dessert.
This apparent desire to push the vegetables to the side of the plate and get right to the custard is one of the banes of IT – the belief that there’s some magical new acronym just around the corner, presumably powered by pixies, that will make everything quick and easy. The result is an appalling ground-hog day experience in which the IT community has managed – in spectacular fashion – to flit repeatedly from trend to trend for the past three decades, only to move on to the next one when it realises that the current fad might actually involve some hard work.

The hot news is that it doesn’t matter how many times you change the acronym – Building good, reliable, maintainable, re-usable services is hard. This isn’t actually hot news – It was hard in the 1990’s when we tried to build services with CORBA and Tuxedo. My long-time friend Neil Ward-Dutton puts it very nicely when he says;

“Just because SOA is difficult to do, we shouldn’t start calling it something else in the hope that we can start over without anyone noticing. And it’s no surprise that SOA is tough to sell to business people—I don’t believe that was ever up for debate, and it shouldn’t be seen as any kind of broader indicator.” (link below)

The good news, though, is that SOA is as fit as a fiddle

SOA is not dead. It’s alive and kicking. The number of success stories grows on a daily basis.
As growing numbers of people succeed, we’re learning (or re-learning) a host of lessons about how to deliver the agility, re-use, scalability and general goodness that a service oriented approach to software architecture, design and development can provide.
A superbly ironic post by Frank Kenney on the Gartner blog site provides some handy insight, highlighting all the “excuses” you can give when your SOA initiative fails.

The bad news is that if you want to succeed, you have to be willing to make an effort

If you want to be successful at anything, you have to commit. If you want to be fit and healthy, you have to be willing to eat your greens, take the odd work-out and stick to your fitness regime.
There is no magic “fitness pill” you can take from the comfort of your couch, and there is no magic “architecture pill” either.
My message to anyone thinking about the current state of SOA is this…

We have a simple choice: get it right, or do it all over again

We have a choice – we can collectively agree to abandon SOA either completely or by fudging the issue and blaming the acronym, or we can re-commit to the the approach that SOA embodies.
If we do the former – Trust me, pundits will be announcing the death of Mash-ups before too long… if we do the latter we’ll be providing an intelligent, strong foundation upon which the next generation of collaborative applications will be able to run reliably, quickly and in a way that makes it easy to enhance and adapt them in the face of change.

Some other useful posts..

From James Governor (Monchips)

“So the dead stuff runs the Enterprise, and there is no money there of course… Because the enterprise is dead. 99% of enterprise transactions run across dead platforms. 90% of Offices still run on dead software. Its all dead.”

From Neil Ward-Dutton (MWDAdvisors)

” Just because SOA is difficult to do, we shouldn’t start calling it something else in the hope that we can start over without anyone noticing. And it’s no surprise that SOA is tough to sell to business people—I don’t believe that was ever up for debate, and it shouldn’t be seen as any kind of broader indicator.
Let’s acknowledge that we all have more work and education to do—but let’s not jump the shark on this. “SOA is Dead” is a headline that no-one needs. “

Robin Bloor

“SOA is not only alive and kicking, it isn’t even confined to its sick bed on doctors orders. It’s up and out there jogging in the park with the rest of those other healthy IT concepts like mashups, Open Source and cloud computing.”

David Linthicum

The value from SOA will actually increase tremendously once we get beyond the hype and the misinformation out there

Shane Schick

4. If SOA is truly dead, we’ll never see the full benefits of server consolidation and virtualization projects.

5. If SOA is truly dead, don’t count on cloud computing or SaaS to fill the gap.

6. If SOA is truly dead, we’ve taken one step forward and two steps back.

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