Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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« Accidential SOA | Main | 'The Only Way is Through SOA' -- Lessons Learned at a University » January 28, 2007Beware the 'Service-Oriented Stovepipe' Are we replacing legacy stovepipes with SOA stovepipes? Mike Reed, managing partner with EWSolutions, warns that many of the 'service-oriented architectures' he's seen more closely resemble the legacy stovepipes they were supposed to replace. "An old phenomenon is reappearing in a new paradigm – ‘stovepiping’ of applications in a supposed ‘service-oriented architecture,' he explains. "If you or your customer has created an Enterprise Service Bus and/or a service-oriented architecture – but you have not centralized any meta data management or advertised your applications’ ‘services’ – you’ve created another stovepipe! And it is not much different than the stovepiped applications we were creating on the mainframe 20+ years ago." Service registries and metadata environments separate true SOA from the stovepipes, Reed says. "Customers need to take the hard steps necessary to standardize on things like UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration). They also need enterprise meta data repositories.... Without these methods to make programs and data available to a broader audience, it’s just the 'same old stovepipe.'" Unfortunately, Reed adds, "the metadata and services registries are the two hardest nuts to crack, so organizations may be tempted to stop short of this part – I am already seeing this occur at customers. They can reap most of the ESB/SOA functionality 'out of the box,' especially things like message brokering for COTS integration, and Web services, but when it comes time to standardize on directory services or metadata standards, they falter, in effect leaving a 'locally defined' SOA where only services/processes inside the system can interoperate – thus creating a 'Service-Oriented Stovepipe.'" Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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