'SOA' dead as of January 1st, analyst says

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SOA marketing

Well, to a lot of people, there is a good deal of skepticism about SOA. We've seen a lot of sales pitches, but most of those seem to be centered around selling a Consultant as opposed to any other product. SOA could be replaced by "SAP", "ERP", "cars", "musical instruments right here in River City" and not alter the pitch other than the one specific place where the name of the product is mentioned. SOA is a MacGuffin for Contractor Sales.

Another reason for resistance is that SOA is not tailored for budgets. It is "transformative" which is pretty much a phrase that means "we need lots of $$$$", but IT is generally the last place people put money into and certainly not a large increase *in addition to* their current existing budget and service requirements. "We want to change everything and have nothing break" because.. well.. bad IT implementations and decision have bankrupted companies before and they will again. That generally means concurrent systems as you need a fallback in case the new one is slow to be implemented or does not work properly.

Then, there is a matter of business case. If you spend $100 million and only gain an improvement of $8 million a year, it is questionable whether it was worth it.

Let's look at one of the buzzwords.

"transformative" nothing to see here. Nothing scary about completely re-architecting your entire business. Is a low risk proposition. Certainly not expensive.

SOA is being pitched at a nice bright big powerpoint slide as a "paradigm", but some poor IT person about 5-6 layers below the TLA level is going to have to find out some way to transform that powerslide into something that works and is going to be under the gun, under pressure, and underfunded. Nor will the IT person be allowed to let the current environment fail.

SOA gets really expensive at that level. That's where the costs are in implementing it. Someone has to determine the current working environment, determine the final product, then the path between. People will need to find the resources to do all of this. It the IT department is already sized to where the staff is doing 90% of their work on just maintaining their existing environment, then they really don't have the resources to launch a new project. And companies that cut their IT staff down to that size are generally not the sort who spends money.

Maybe the soft sale and focus on some big fluffy picture down the road is another major problem. This is not an easy migration. Too many people seem to gloss that over. Start selling the steps of the transformation as much as the final product. Make business cases for each step of the way. Start drawing some connection between the size of the migration or development and the budget and income of the companies. Adjust the timelines to match budgets.

SOA is neither dead or alive. It has mostly been undead since birth as it is a niche paradigm and architecture that needs so many specific preconditions to exist, it really has not managed to reach mainstream yet. Parts of it will move out and get implemented. But, this isn't something that is going to be done by a lot of companies as a whole transformative step in one big project.

Posted by: rijrunner   Posted on: 01/06/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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