This one you can file on the "this just in…fire is hot!" kinds of stories. Loraine Lawson, in her well written blog posting, pointed out that Gartner considers application integration as a necessity for SOA. Petty obvious to me, I'm sure you guys as well.

From the posting:

"If you think moving to SOA means you won't have to deal separately with application integration, think again, says Gartner research vice president Jess Thompson. Thompson contends application integration is fundamental for deploying services, especially given Gartner's prediction that over 70 percent of services deployed through SOA will be built using existing applications."

What's troubling about this is that the binding of the concepts of application integration and SOA was even in question. Indeed, if you have a well planned and designed SOA, application integration has to be systemic to the architecture. Application integration is a byproduct of SOA. SOA, is architecture, and thus encompasses many different things. Keep that in mind.

Also, I think the "70 percent of service deployed through SOA will be built using existing applications" is a bit low. I think it's more like 80 – 90 percent, when considering my data points. That mix will change over time, but not anytime soon. SOA is not "rip and replace" it's "wrap and reuse," and the only way SOA will win if it's able to reuse and leverage existing applications.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on October 26, 2007 08:24 AM