With the exception of the World Wide Web’s ascent a decade ago, few recent technology movements have received as much attention as service-oriented architecture.
If you use SOA to create and manage lean software applications of well-defined work processes, you’ll finally have the tools to glue together disparate systems into a collaborative whole, proponents say. They add that SOA is a way to assemble services into agile composite applications that help complex organizations turn on a dime. Its other benefits include writing code once and using it in multiple applications, extending the life of older programs and re-orchestrating business processes for greater efficiency.
To the wary, SOA sounds like the latest silver bullet that never quite lives up to the promises. “It’s a bit like pixie dust — just rub some on and the results are marvelous,” said David Sprott, chief executive officer of Everware-CBDI, a research and consulting firm. The reality is less magical, he added, because by definition SOA addresses information technology architectures. “Nothing that’s architectural in nature is going to be an instant fix,” Sprott said.
Where do SOA’s benefits end and pixie dust sparkle begin? We examine seven widely held assumptions about SOA to gauge how closely the dream matches reality.
Assumption No. 1: Everybody’s using SOA Reality: False
In Arkansas, SOA hype is breeding caution. “We don’t even want to use that term ‘SOA’ because of the baggage it brings,” said Drew Mashburn, the state’s chief enterprise architect. Thus far, the state is still investigating the technology and has yet to begin a large-scale implementation, he added.
According to estimates by market research company Gartner, Arkansas isn’t unique. Although interest in SOA is high, only about 12 percent of organizations say SOA will attract a lion’s share of their application development efforts this year.
“If I ask an audience of 300 people how many use Web services, every hand goes up,” said Burr Sutter, senior product manager at the JBoss division of open-source software vendor Red Hat. Web services are industry standards for building interoperable applications that are closely associated with SOA. “If I then ask how many people have more than five Web services, half the hands go down. It’s obvious to me not everybody is using a ton of Web services.”
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