Last week I was asked to speak at the Info World SOA Executive Forum in NYC, as well as sit in on the "Technology: The State of That Stack: Where Web Services Standards Are Today." panel, with:

Moderator: Rohit Khare, Research Director, Commerce Net
Dr. Toufic Boubez, CTO, Layer 7
TN Subramanium, Chief Architect and Director of Technology, RouteOne LLC
Steve Vinoski, Chief Engineer, IONA Technologies

And me,

David Linthicum, CEO, Bridgewerx and InfoWorld's Real World SOA Blogger

First of all I hate panels. I won't moderate them if it can be helped, and after sitting on them I always feel I need a shower. However, this one was different. Rohit did a great job in focusing the panel, and the panelists had some very interesting things to say about the state of standards.

The long and the short of the conversation was that there are too many standards, they are too confusing, and many of the standards, such as BPEL, don’t work without a ton of proprietary enhancements. Indeed the WS-* standards are actually hurting the emerging SOA space, since there are so many and the fact that some are redundant and competing.

So, what do you do about all this? Here are a few suggestions from me:

First of all, get the marketing guys out of there. Vendors are starting standards to draw attention to their products, not to help users. We're losing focus about why standards exist.

Second, the users need to push back on this, send a clear message to the vendors who are looking to create standards as a selling mechanism. If the users vote with their dollars, believe me, the vendors will listen.

Finally, let's focus on making a few standards work. We seem to get many of them about 70-80 percent cooked, then let them flounder. Perhaps that's one of the issues with having too many standards to pay attention too.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on May 22, 2006 02:23 PM