Business Transformation in Action

My colleague Peter Schooff posted a great question for this week's Sound-off Forum on "What Do You Think Will be the Biggest Trend or Development for SOA in 2010?" I urge everyone to join in on the discussion and post their thoughts on what lies in the year ahead. 

Here is my list of the Top 10 trends we may see evolve in the year ahead.

1. Service-oriented principles will see a resurgence of interest because they are required for effective governance and delivery of cloud services. (But don't dare call it "SOA"!)
2. As the economy recovers, there will be a huge surge in entrepreneurial ventures (by individuals and by teams within already established organizations). Many will operate, from an IT perspective, entirely from the cloud. We're already seeing examples of 100% cloud-based operations. Again, to manage successfully, service-oriented principles will be essential.
3. As businesses emerge from the funk and look to grow more aggressively, they will turn to greater reliance on analytic dashboards. There will continue to be rising interest in complex event processing (CEP), and the event-driven architecture (EDA) required to sustain it.
4. There will be a greater focus on improving the quality, timeliness, and trustworthiness of data flowing through SOAs. Data services will become an increasingly important component of SOA efforts.
5. Vendors will talk less about "SOA" and more about the "Cloud." But from their perspective, rightly or wrongly, these two terms will be interchangeable. Expect a lot of announcements talking about Cloud/SOA capabilities.
6. Cloud governance will increasingly be a concern for organizations that suddenly realize they have a tangle of point-to-point cloud services, with no central accountability. Expect to see a push for applying SOA governance tools and repositories to cloud-based services.
7. More SOA capabilities and products themselves will delivered from the cloud -- a la "Integration as a Service" and so forth.
   
8. Microsoft, with Oslo, WCF, BizTalk, and .NET Framework, will make a big push for service-orienting the small business sector -- much of it delivered from the Cloud.
9. SOAP and WS-* -- the core of Web services for years -- will be increasingly pushed aside by lighter-weight protocols such as REST. Many SOA efforts will be a hybrid of SOAP and REST-based services.
10. Enterprise mashups will become the most common form of user access to back-end services. This may help boost business users' understanding of what SOA is all about.