It looks like the anti-SOA 2.0 on-line petition is passing 400 entries now, and growing. Proof positive that people are getting sick of the hype around SOA, and want the vendors and service providers to focus on the discipline, not the marketecture. So, are the marketing departments listening? I'm not sure they are, and this is only going to hurt the progress being made here and their bottom lines as well.

What;s clear about the SOA is that while we are beginning to see tactical successes now, the large scale benefits of leveraging this concept have yet to be understood by most organizations, albeit there are a few successes to report on now. Truth-be-told it's going to take time before we can brag about the benefits of SOA, and perhaps the hype will have died down by then, and thus some of the confusion that's around today. This confusion includes the number of WS-* standards that are around, many of which are redundant and conflicting. But, that's another column or blog.

While "SOA 2.0" is a silly notion, we are indeed looking to evolve our thinking to a place where SOA is more of "the architecture" not "an architecture," there is a difference. What's is more, we need to understand that systemic changes such as the use of SOA is going to take many years, for most organizations, to implement, and unfortunately there are no shortcuts such as just changing version numbers.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on July 6, 2006 06:04 AM