A SOA by any other name

Now that the SOA mourning period is pretty much over, I suppose it's time to move on to the next big thing that now appears to be cloud computing.

But what are we dgoing to do about all those projects otherwise known as SOA? After all, they got a green light from management and actually delivered value so we can't just stop working on them simply because the project name has been declared taboo.

This issue got me thinking about the conversations that are happening at a lot of companies today in terms of IT budgets and SOA initiatives.

As I sat down with Anne Thomas Manes this week, it became clear that one of the reasons that SOA didn't live up to its promise was because the IT and business teams weren't speaking the same language.

IBM's Sandy Carter's pointed out this issue in 2007 when she wrote "Selling SOA to the CEO" as a guest of SearchSOA. In fact, her first recommendation was 'don't call it SOA.' (You could also argue that SOA adoption suffered due to an identity crisis. After all, the industry couldn't even agree on a standard definition.)

The reality is that SOA is not going away. It will continue on as a critical IT and business initiative though will likely earn a new moniker or perhaps just become part of the way we work.

It doesn't take much of leap to see how important the role of the architecture is to making cloud computing work. It also doesn't take much to realize that a conversation with a business exec. about architectures, ESBs and web services is fruitless when the purpose of the meting is to articulate how technology investments will deliver value to the company.

Though I fear that cloud computing may be the next misunderstood opportunity if the business benefits are not clearly outlined and if cloudy definitions prevail.

We're actually starting to see the misconceptions happening with regarding to cloud computing as Infoworld's Eric Knorr recently pointed out in his post, "Defogging Cloud Computing."

And while many believe that SOA projects will continue and will prove to be a critical part of cloud computing, we are currently stuck in a holding pattern with regard to what we actually call that project previously known as SOA.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on renaming SOA. This time, let's try to work on this name together and agree on its definition.

-Jeff