Pirate SOA -- IT's Secret Weapon

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December 06, 2007

Pirate SOA -- IT's Secret Weapon

'Pirate SOA -- IT's Secret Weapon' -- that's a good way to describe the gist of the recent panel discussion I hosted with SOA-digerati luminaries Dana Gardner and Phil Wainewright, as part of ebizQ's SOA in Action conference. Complete transcript here, podcast here.)

For many organizations, 'Pirate SOA' may be the only way to get SOA methodologies and sensibilities into their organizations. Management may be too hesitant, or simple too clueless about what SOA can mean for them.

Web 2.0 -- through mashups and SaaS -- introduces rapid, user-driven development and deployment to SOA scenarios. Dana says that a good term to describe the Web 2.0-ish approaches to building out service-oriented architecture is "Guerrilla SOA" -- meaning that "small groups of people, working with lightweight architecture and tools, can accomplish an awful lot when it comes to green field development of services and when it comes to down-and-dirty projects to do integration, compositing and to basically solve the problem of the day on an ad hoc basis."

Of course, as Phil pointed out, the fears around the chaotic and unsupervised nature of Web 2.0-based development and deployment sounds exactly like the fears that surrounded Web services and SOA in its early days. "There was a time when SOA was seen as very emergent and perhaps threatening," he said, pointing out that many people see the result as having been "'just a bunch of Web services' in which people kind of start of do point-to-point Web service integration and perhaps end up with a whole spaghetti mess of uncoordinated, ungoverned SOA, perhaps not worthy of the name architecture. Of course, I think that's the fear around Web 2.0 that because it's emergent and by their nature, emergent technologies are chaotic, uncontrolled, ungovernable, there's this sense that you don't really want them in your nicely cultivated, managed service-oriented architecture in case it kind of ruins the show."

Nevertheless, Dana warned that the rise of the Web 2.0 methodologies -- which provide Web-based platforms at almost no cost -- will seriously disrupt the current marketplace. "The smaller companies that can be capitalized for much less money than in the past, that can start up and go into existing markets and work much more quickly than to help customers or users acquire services and to gain some productivity and business benefit, but without having to drag along the legacy of IT infrastructure -- and to avail themselves of services off the wire increasingly and the ability to host themselves cheaply and such things as what Amazon is providing with Elastic Compute Cloud."

If this scenario plays out, Dana continued, "We have a situation in the marketplace where there's a great deal of disruption from small start-ups that can work in almost like we saw in the 80s with pirates, corporate raiders that would come in and break companies up and sell the parts. It's almost the same notion of a raider or a pirate mentality I would think for small Web 2.0 services-oriented organizations and if that's the case, that's going to compel and force the bigger companies to adopt these sorts of practices."

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