SOA is Dead?

Burton Group analyst Anne Thomas Manes has declared SOA dead.

She has been quoted as saying:

SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession.

Although the word 'SOA' is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever.

SOA helps reduce cost and provides business agility, so it really addresses the two biggest concerns going on.

These are three key points. Lets start from the last point. SOA help reduce cost and business agility. And the need for SOA is stronger than ever.

However, there is a catch. The economic recession is hindering SOA adoption. SOA has been proven costly to implement, and IT budget cuts, higher costs can no longer be afforded.

Now, you are into a vicious cycle. SOA would help reduce costs, but the budget cuts prevent SOA adoption. So you cannot afford to be as agile as you wish. But you need to be agile to face recession challenges.

How can you break the vicious cycle, to help you continue to adopt SOA to cut costs and be agile in these turbulent times?

Why is SOA costly? SOA is costly, because the SOA enables are costly. The bits and pieces that you used from various vendors to implement your SOA was too costly. The vendors, when they offered you their SOA enabling tools, promised loose coupling and seamless integration. But all those features that enables seamless integration and loose coupling were priced so high. That made SOA financially non feasible.

WSO2 understood this reality way back in the beginning of 2008. WSO2 realized that, even its own products were tough to integrate, though not impossible. Hence it undertook the design of the unified product platform, namely WSO2 Carbon. Service hosting, ESB, Registry and Business Process Server - the BPM enabling server, are four products. But you do not have to spend time or money to integrate those, as they come integrated. You can either host them together or separate and wire them through EIPs.

The unified SOA platform form WSO2 cut costs in various forms:

  • Easy to deploy and easy to manage. Thanks to the powerful management console. Zero code deployments. Saves debug and troubleshooting time.
  • Registry based SOA appliances. You can wither use a localized registry or use a remote registry. This cuts down your resource sharing efforts and governance efforts, saving costs in that space
  • Open source, free to use, free support with mailing lists and forums, and reasonable rates for development and production support
  • State of the art technology, with unmatched feature set, and complete platform. You need not go to other vendors in search of missing features.

Use WSO2 Carbon. Break the vicious cycle. Overcome recession. It is time to resurrect your SOA platform with WSO2 Carbon

Comments

I just blogged that I think “Big SOA is Dead; Little SOA is Thriving” at: http://tinyurl.com/soa-today2 . Ok, maybe Big SOA isn’t “dead”, but certainly struggling to convince companies to invest in BPM, BAM, ESB (Big SOA) in today’s economic climate is a tough, academic sell when they can go Little SOA with positive ROI. Organizations want rapid results– they want SOA Today and not 6-9 months down the line!