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SOA can appear overwhelming because as an architecture it is proposed as a solution to all integration challenges for every industry and for every scale and complexity of company. Clearly, the way SOA will be manifested in any given company will reflect that organization’s goals, structure, history and even its corporate culture. This is not only from a technology point of view but also from a business point of view – after all SOA is all about alignment of technology with the business.

The Forrester ESB wave research I mentioned in the last item reported different rates of take up among different sized firms, with 67% of larger firms implementing SOA this year compared to 44% of small to medium sized businesses. This is hardly surprising as the larger firms will typically have larger problems and larger IT departments capable and willing to take on SOA earlier in its evolution.

Aberdeen’s latest research focuses in part on a different issue: the emerging styles of SOA adoption. In particular, they identify three styles:

• SOA Lite is for users who are primarily deploying web services that do not require mission-critical capabilities such as high-volume scalability, high availability and failover, management, governance, and security.

• SOA ERP is used by companies that are choosing to deploy SOA surrounding their ERP application software.

• Enterprise SOA requires and uses mission-critical SOA middleware suite capabilities.

I don’t think that the fact there are different styles is in anyway surprising, nor are the three identified surprising as they match three common approaches to integration and within a single organization one or more will be present.

The first is for those organizations which solving light-weight problems in a direct and immediate fashion. SOA for these people provides a more systematic approach but must avoid over-burdening them with cost through over-engineering.

The second is the natural progression for organizations which have already chosen an ERP centric architecture – for these it makes sense to use SOA as an extension mechanism. It would make no sense to abandon the ERP centric world-view while moving to SOA.

The third is for those typically large organizations which have a multi-polar IT architecture, without a single center of gravity corresponding to an ERP system (for instance). These are typically the most complex organizations which probably have the most significant investment in middleware. This is the SOA style that gets talked and written about most – partly because these are often the organizations that adopted SOA first and they are also the organizations being targeted by vendors because they will make the largest purchases!

Of course, this is but one approach to defining SOA styles. You could also think about vertical specializations of SOA as David Linthicum recently covered or more technical distinctions between event-focused SOA and RPC-focused SOA, a distinction that unfortunately spawned the concept of SOA 2.0 (and I use the word spawned deliberately).

The inportance of all of this is that it allows us to move from the view of SOA as all encompassing (and confusing) architecture to something more focused on our problem domain – hence allowing appropriate architecture and product selections to be made. The fact that styles are being thought about and identified now simply shows the maturing of the SOA world.

Posted by rbradley in SOA concepts |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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