The Year Ahead in SOA: We'll have FUD, FUD, FUD

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January 10, 2007

The Year Ahead in SOA: We'll have FUD, FUD, FUD

Vendor acquisitions and governance were big on the SOA radar screen in 2006, and portend more of the same for 2007. Is what's happening in the SOA space indicative of our willingness and readiness to go all out with enterprise SOA, or simply vendors trying to cash in on fear, uncertainty, and doubt?

I recently had the opportunity to help debate this question in a panel discussion podcast, led by Dana Gardner, to talk about the year just passed and the year ahead in SOA. (Link to podcast here.)

Dana, a principal with InterArbor Solutions and ZDNet blogger, asked panelists (teve Garone, Jon Collins, Tony Baer, and myself) what we thought the most important development in 2006 was, and what 2007 will bring for SOA.

Jon Collins of Macehiter Ward-Hutton made the point that 2006 as the year that "SOA has become mainstream," at least for IT companies. The evidence was in the wave of acquisitions of SOA vendors, he said. However, ironically, "the one thing that’s been lacking so far is integration, which is to me the ultimate irony, because its exactly what SOA is about as a concept. It’s about helping bring together the disparate pieces."

Dana questioned the prominent play governance has been receiving, given the early stages of most SOA deployments. "It seemed that the value here was that, you're going to be headed toward some sort of a train wreck if you ramp up SOA, so we have to put governance into play. Yet, these things remain predominantly as pilots, isolated -- not horizontal, not yet at the scale where the system is breaking down under load, pressure and volume. Yet, there is this big drive to governance. Governance is a way of extending SOA into a larger role of transformation, taking over where policy and even directory left off -- it' sort of a land grab by these vendors into this larger domain of how to actually manage your business, not just your IT."

Steve Garone of AlignIT Group agreed, and added that this positioning is creating a great deal of confusion in the market. "There's been a lot of talk about enablers to SOA -- governance, ESBs, which I think is another very important one. Because of the way vendors approach providing solutions, sometimes the enablers become a point of confusion to the point where it actually slows down adoption. I think some confusion around standards is also playing a role in that."

I agreed as well, but also interjected that it was interesting to see Microsoft begin talking up SOA in recent months: "To Microsoft the ESB probably meant enterprise service buses or those vehicles that employees ride around on at the Redmond campus. It seems that Microsoft has gotten on board with the ESB concept lately as well, which surprised a lot of observers, because Microsoft usually likes to take its own route with things and not buy into the acronym of the moment."

What about the year ahead? Aside from vendor FUD, what will 2007 bring? Dana predicted that 2007 will be "the year of modeling," which will bring more robust tools and approaches to choreographing services.

Steve Garone predicted that divisions within organizations will continue to hamper enterprise-wide SOA efforts. "A lot of folks on both sides of that pointing fingers and claiming that the other one doesn’t get it." As a result Garone continued, many SOA efforts remain ground in pilot implementations.

Tony Baer of OnStrategies said that for the most part, rather than attempts at "big-bang" SOA implementations, the vast majority of implementations will take a safer, more "boring" route — incrementally. "I think the mainstream will incrementally get to the first things beyond the skunkworks stage."

I opined that perhaps the term "SOA" (but not the concept) will begin to have run its course, and vendors may begin playing up some new themes, perhaps Event Driven Architecture. I also agreed that SOA efforts may get more C-level cred in 2007, but another problem may rear its head — simply having enough staff to get SOA efforts going. IT budgets are going strong and there's shortages of the right types of skills popping up all over the place. For enterprises that need to keep their day-to-day operations going, it maybe difficult to allocate the human resources to really move SOA projects forward.

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Comments

What exactly is FUD? It is mentioned three times in the title and only once in the eighth paragraph of the article, but never explained. If this is an industry standard term, I apologize for my ignorance....but I work in the industry and am not sure what the term means.

Posted by: Pat Woods at February 13, 2007 01:56 PM

FUD means "fear, uncertainty, and doubt," which is the mindset vendors use to keep users locked into their solutions and upgrades. For example, a vendor may hint that it may stop supporting an earlier version of their software product, forcing users to upgrade to their latest and greatest product. Hope that clarifies! -Joe

Posted by: Joe McKendrick at February 14, 2007 11:25 AM