SOA Needs All the Essential 'ilities'

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November 06, 2006

SOA Needs All the Essential 'ilities'

On the SOA in Action page, you will see a series of podcasts I recently conducted with technology leaders from seven SOA vendors as part of this week's InfoWorld Executive Forum. With the help of Gian Trotta -- who wrote up and posted the interviews -- we have painted a picture of the state of SOA in 2006.

Over the coming days, I will provide some snapshots and links to the interviews. Today, we start with Dan Foody, CTO of Progress Software, who talks about connecting SOA with all the essential "ilities" enterprises need to worry about -- reliability, scalability, manageability, flexibility -- and most importantly -- agility. (The podcast available for download here.)

What does it take to deliver agility through SOA? "What I hear over and over again is that SOA has nothing to do with technology," Foody said. "It’s truly organizational shifts that are required in the move to SOA. How do you incentivize people to want to reuse services? How do you get people in the IT organization to think about what the business cares about? How do you get them to think about information and business processes rather than the underlying technological infrastructure?"

SOA is not "thinking about ‘how does my database, my middleware, my portal tier, my app tier work?' It’s about inventory, fulfillment, ordering, and whatever those business functions are for the organization. That’s a major shift for many organizations in how they’re structured and how they think about how they build their organizations."

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