Dave Linthicum's Podcast Channel« Guiding Germans to SOA | Main | SOA Expert Podcast Show 34...SOA Press Conference at Business Integration 2006 in Frankfurt »
April 05, 2006Common Pattern: Big Software does not Get SOA
Heading back from the Frankfurt conference soon, and I did spend a lot of time with the attendees trying to get a feel for SOA need. There were a few surprising patterns that began to emerge from my many meetings.
First, SOA is much more hype than reality. No brainier there, the marketing guys are well ahead of the technology, and those purchasing the technology know that.
Second, no clear direction and guidance. There is direction and guidance; you just need to know where to look, and which guidance to take.
Finally, and most surprising, the big software vendors don’t seem to understand the needs of their own user base and don’t seem to understand the value of SOA. I heard this many times this week, including the following comments:
“Our vendor keeps shoving their older technology at us and calling it SOA, when clearly it’s not. This is disturbing, and confusing, and the vendors are loosing creditability.”
“We are getting technology pushed at us instead of solutions. We’ve been down this path before, it’s not a good thing.”
“Nobody is defining the value of SOA for us during the sales cycle, and it’s difficult to justify the costs before somebody does that. Our SOA implementation will go into the millions of dollars….”
Just seems to be an emerging pattern. My suggestion is that we all learn to define the value first, than the requirements, than the solution, and only then the technology. The big guys need to understand this else risk losing customers and credibility. I’m not sure which is worse.
Posted by davel at 03:46 AM in
| 
Digg This | 
Add to del.icio.us
Nobody's listening, Dave. Haven't you noticed? There aren't any comments here - mine is the first.
SOA is different for every vendor: just another way to sell their products. But that's not the worst of it.
If you really tried to sell SOA atop WS-* that would be really bad because:
- the WS-* standards were written by W3C's groups _before_ there was established practice (so they're guaranteed to not work),
- the WS-* standards, and especially the vendors, downplay the role of those standards and practices (e.g., REST) that DO work well,
- SOA and WS-* are both flawed in that they try to hide from view Peter Deutsch's "8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing". But the WWW is not transparent.
But most importantly, nobody's listening. So if you ask, "Can I lead the way to SOA?" my answer would have to be "I can't do that, Dave."
Posted by: Lars Tasse at April 12, 2006 11:22 PM
Post a comment
