Real World SOA | David Linthicum | InfoWorld | SOA…By Any Other Name | February 22, 2008 05:55 AM

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SOA…By Any Other Name

February 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)

SOA…By Any Other Name

David Millman made some thought provoking points in his post, SOA - We Got the Name Wrong.

"So to shift the focus, I am renaming SOA from Service Oriented Architecture to Solution Oriented Architecture, this moves the problem front and center not the technology. Yes, we still need the various technologies to solve the solution: ESB for connection, mediation and control of the services, governance and visibility to manage and control the complete solution, and data management to ensure that all the information we use is correct. But we are now also using these and others in a combined manner to reach a complete solution."

Okay, I think I get that. However, the term "solutions oriented" has a pretty heavy list of applications over the years, and I'm pretty sure that the name will confuse things even more. I coined a term "Solutions Oriented Middleware" in the 90s, when I was CTO of SAGA (now a part of SoftwareAG), and I'm pretty sure I picked up "solutions oriented" in my tenure as a consultant in the early 90s. Who knows, who cares?

To David's point, however, the term service oriented architecture does lead many to believe that Web services are always the way. That's not really true, indeed services can be deployed using any number of technology approaches, languages, and standards. I never saw SOA as a Web services only approach. It's really just a way of doing architecture, no biggy there.

If you've seen my posts and listened to my Podcasts, you know that I believe that SOA and enterprise architecture will morph together over time, since both are really more about architecture than anything else. However, we love new TLAs, and SOA stuck before other ways of describing this approach. I guess you can call it anything.

David concludes:

"Or, perhaps, we should look at changing the acronyms completely and SOA becomes SOB - Service Oriented Business (or what you do if it fails), but my new favorite is BaaS - Business as a Service where companies would now be a service or services, but I guess nothing is that new because I can Google BaaS and get references to that too."

Not sure it really matters what you call it, as long as you do it right.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on February 22, 2008 05:55 AM

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COMMENTS

I like both BS and SOB.

Posted by: miko matsumura at February 22, 2008 02:36 PM

I think SOA should be renamed: SbOA, in the interests of "truth in advertising".

Silver Bullet Oriented Architecture.

Definitely more accurate a description. ;-)

Posted by: andrzej at February 22, 2008 04:30 PM

Like Mr. Millman, I find that most of the issues with SOA comes from having fundamentally misunderstood the value proposition.

Top people in companies with excellent track records are on a wild goose chase, building Web Service based web apps doing Web Service based integration with Web Service based Web Service services for the Web...

Without EVER considering WHY!

This is about BUSINESS PROCESSES. It's not about technology, not about systems integration, not about busses and mediation or even standards.

The value proposition of SOA is about enabling dynamic changes to business processes, without having to change the tools that support the processes any more than the processes themselves.

If the tools aren't hooked up to the processes, then it is just a very expensive technology implementation, which - as a large amount of the general opinion - already has deemed a colossal failure and a useless repetition of past failiures to deliver on object orientation paradigms.

The term "SOA" suffers gravely from the link to "Services" and the misconception of those services being Web Services. Even when people realize, that this is not the case, they are still stuck in the misconception to a point, where the focus is still the integration points, and while they might no longer be just Web Service based, they are still extremely granular and functionally useless to the business.

From a practicality point of view, they are just overloading the infrastructure with a gazillion integration points, and from a modelling point of view, the granularity makes it impossible for the business modellers to relate to the services.

Services in a SOA must have a tight relationship to the business processes they support. It must be instictively possible to visualize and model new processes from existing services, as well as discover need for new services.

If it isn't part of a process, then it's just part of a problem.

If we need to replace the term - and we might benefit from that - we should disconnect the term from words that imply "technology".

Process Oriented Business perhaps?

Posted by: Lars Olufsen at February 25, 2008 12:27 PM

Excellent closing sentence. That should have been the headline!

david

Posted by: David Bressler at February 26, 2008 01:11 PM

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