In Anne Thomas Manes’s blog, she states:

SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”.

It’s a good read and certainly a legitimate way of looking at the world. As you know from my blog, I have taken a very evolutionary perspective on SOA and on technologies used in the Enterprise in general. When I say “evolutionary” I do NOT mean incrementalist. Over the course of 2 years, very little changes–but over the course of 10 years things are typically substantially transformed. I subscribe to the model of evolution espoused by the late great Stephen Jay Gould–of Punctuated Equilibrium.

The image of the big SOA dinosaur is certainly a viable image… We could characterize project like these as being very large, slow moving and vulnerable, and part of the large upfront capital expenditure model of IT in the late 1990’s.

The thing is, evolution grows by leaps and bounds–I spoke of this when I wrote about what I learned from my breakfast with Steve Wozniak, which is that evolution is constantly devising new solutions, and doing so under extreme survival pressure. The lungfish crawls out of land to breathe air not because it’s expressing itself creatively, it is because the pond has dried up. The Archaeopterix flies in the air not to experience the trancendental joy of soaring, but to avoid the snapping jaws of predation. These moments in evolutionary history are not without precedent and always of historiographic import as they are subject to revisionism.

What remains is the fundamental evolutionary need–to survive and to compete in business. Those “organisms” who are burdened with the evolutionary legacy of their heterogeneous infrastructure and are unable to come up with agile, dynamic ways to recombine these systems will become extinct. Whether the patterns of management to enable these new adaptation layers are called SOA or something else remains to be seen, but the organizations that fail to transcend their legacy history and complexity of architecture to emerge reformed as the new flying, air breathing, small, furry mammals of the new age (not neccesarily all of the above strategies can be combined in a single creature) will of course be doomed to the tar pits of history.

I believe that use of SOA as a term will certainly decline, but the strategies to address the fundamental problems will have to continue to evolve out of the SOA “stream”. At the same time SOA is dead, SOA is also inevitable–but it may come under a different name. The DNA of large organizations will require interfaces to appropriately segment the what of requirements from the how of implementation, and the design patterns of SOA will be the ones that will realize the long term vision of an Enterprise, Multi-Enterprise, and indeed “cloud” platform. Any term like SOA has to experience the hype cycle and goes through linguistic mystique, implementation, experimentation, and eventually a degree of nomenclature fatigue. SOA had a particularly “big tent” agenda and so a lot of folks latched on to it in the hopes that SOA would be their savior. Frankly I see the same kind of pattern in “cloud”, which is to say that it’s not an easily defined technical term, rather a set of political interested tied to a set of insights and realizations.

For 2009, it’s incumbent upon us as participants in the unfolding of the world’s technology platform that we don’t overreact to the external conditions that are foisted upon us. Fear about the economy should take a back seat to the project of becoming the change we need. The era of knee-jerk emotional reaction can hopefully be relegated to 2008 (or perhaps the first half of 2009) and we can move forward together to both re-envision and rebuild our infrastructure. And to realize the big vision we need each and every person to become the change we need.

I’m indifferent to whether we continue to call it SOA or not, lets just keep building the future together.

My 2 bits,
Miko

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