Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Disoriented and Disenchanted

Looks like SOA is the Next Big Thing all over again
Page:

I recently attended a seminar on service-oriented architecture (SOA) mainly to discover why, given it's already been around for a few years (an eternity in IT management time), people are still holding seminars on it.

My younger colleague remarked that oriented was an unusual word and suggested it was probably coined by a consultant. It turns out he was spot on. SOA was lobbed onto the acronym court in a 1996 research paper by a Gartner boffin, although the term didn't become widely used until around 2002.

SOA associates new terminology with concepts that have been around for some time such as CORBA, DCOM and DCE. SOA's new concept is the concept that it is new, while in reality it's just re-using ideas that were the Next Big Thing a decade ago. But the IT industry has never let history get in its way, so with a shiny new acronym SOA is now this decade's Next Big Thing.

Earlier this year, a joint research project by Computerworld and Hydrasight on local adoption rates of SOA revealed 44 percent of companies surveyed had already started or piloted SOA projects. A different measure of its success is the survey by Network Computing that found SOA was the most despised buzzword last year.

Not only is SOA a buzzword itself, descriptions of SOA are jam-packed with buzzwords. Orchestrate, granularity, composability, componentization, centre of excellence, proven international governance standards, control objectives and (my personal favourite) SOA reference architecture. Wow, two architectures in the one buzz phrase. The best buzz comes from OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), which defines SOA as "a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains". Which, aside from the admirable use of the former buzz champion paradigm, doesn't actually say anything.

Although everyone tells me that SOA is a definition and not just a set of products, I might find it a wee more credible if the people telling me were not all software vendors pushing their set of SOA products.

Page:

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Boss, Brother, Edge Technologies, Gartner, HIS Limited, Hydrasight, IBM, Open Group, Oracle, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, Paradigm, Tibco, Vicinity

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Security Threat Report 2012
    This threat report shares the latest research on hacktivism, online threats, mobile malware, cloud computing, and social network security looking ahead to the coming year.
    Learn more »
  • 2012 Data Backup Strategy Guide
    Articles include: 10 best cloud backup strategies for biz continuity, Disk or tape? How about both, Protect Your Backup Data from Murphy’s Law, Back up without crashing.
    Learn more »
  • Eight threats your antivirus won’t stop - Why you need endpoint security
    News headlines are a constant reminder that malware attacks and data loss are on the rise. High-profile incidents that make big news might seem out of the ordinary. Yet businesses of every size face similar risks in the everyday acts of using digital technology and the Internet for legitimate purposes. This paper outlines eight common threats that traditional antivirus alone won’t stop, and explains how to protect your organisation using endpoint security.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.

HP and IDG news, product videos and resources