Gartner's Roy Schulte: SOA Options Grow, But Standards Lag

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November 05, 2007

Gartner's Roy Schulte: SOA Options Grow, But Standards Lag

Service oriented architecture has come a long way over the past decade, and progress has been impressive. But issues around immature standards and proprietary platforms still make the SOA dream elusive -- and don't expect any significant progress any time within the next three to four years.

That's the prognosis offered by Gartner analyst Roy Schulte, who kicked off ebizQ's SOA in Action conference with a progress report on the state of SOA. Click here and proceed to the "Conference Hall" to access the archives of all nine presentations. (Free registration required.)

Roy offered some history that I was not aware of -- that the actual term "Service Oriented Architecture" was first coined by Alexander Pasik, then a Gartner analyst, around 1994.

Roy and fellow Gartner analyst Yafim Natis published their first report on SOA in 1996, predicting that most companies would have adopted the paradigm for large applications by 2001. "That wasn’t quite right, we were off by three or four years," he recounted. "It took until 2004 or so until a third of large applications had some traces of SOA in them. A majority of applications today use some SOA in some part of their operations."

He may not want to take credit for first identifying the SOA trend, but Roy has been on top of this movement right from the beginning. I first saw him speak at a BEA-hosted event in New York back in 1996, when he predicted the shift away from applications toward middleware component-based architectures.

Now, SOA is part of a tide sweeping enterprises across the globe, he said. No matter what type of organization, "SOA is going to happen anyway, because there are so many factors pushing it," he said. "The packaged applications that are being offered on the market are SOA, so if you buy a package, you’re probably going to get SOA. The development tools tat are being offered by all the vendors are suitable for SOA, so people are going to be going to service oriented architecture at a fast pace."

However, interoperable standards development has slowed to a crawl, forcing companies to build or buy proprietary gateways and connectors to achieve some semblance of service-orientation across different systems. "It’s going to be more difficult to achieve heterogeneous SOA spanning different operating systems and more app servers than what we would like," Roy said. "We’re still going to have SOA, it’s going to come at a fast pace, but unfortunately, its going to be more difficult to have heterogeneous SOA than what we all had hoped."

Cooperative standards development is and will remain fairly stagnate for the foreseeable future, Roy added. "Between today and 2011, we’re not anticipating a lot of growth," he said. "The services that work today, the compatibility today is limited to fairly low-level interactions -- the kind of interactions that you would see taking place between the presentation layer of the application and the business logic layer of the application. In most cases we’re talking about a request and reply model, and we’re not talking about advanced quality of service features."

What is needed is server-to-server quality of service standards, Roy urges. "What we don’t have much in standards today is the server-to-server kind of traffic, where a service provider component talks to another service-provider component. This is where you would have a component doing business logic and data logic, acting as a consumer, talking to another component that’s doing business logic and data logic. For these kinds of interactions, you need other types of features -- things like quality of service, involving message queuing, publish and subscribe, and other kinds of capabilities."

Roy observed that it has almost taken five years "to get Reliable Messaging to be implemented by most of the vendors, though its not quite here yet. We are expecting that to happen by 2011."

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