Apparently, “SOA” has been declared dead.  The wording is very dramatic and it comes from the blogs of the Burton Group so it’s quite authoritative.  The economy swooped down like a massive meteor and boom, “SOA” went with the rest of the IT dinosaurs.

Except if you read the article, you’ll quickly realize that service-oriented architecture is not dead.  Phew.  You had me worried for a bit there, Anne.  What really died is “SOA”, the enterprise IT buzzword.  Service-oriented architecture is actually a really great idea. This is not surprising as it has been proven in practice by the largest distributed software system in the world: the world wide web.  The explosion of web application mash-ups using web APIs is the best kind of example of why services are such an awesome idea.

The problem with “SOA” was twofold:

  1. Service-oriented architecture is not a silver bullet (nothing is) but like any new architecture/design buzzword, it got marketed as one and the vendors quickly jumped on the bandwagon to provide “SOA” products.  As Anne points out in her article, the technology behind service-oriented architecture largely got in the way of the core idea.
  2. Embracing service-oriented architecture is not as simple as buying a product and embarking on a quick (re-)integration project.  It requires completely re-thinking the way you approach enterprise software architecture.

And so, “SOA” joins the legacy of IT buzzwords that have been bludgeoned to death by hype and marketing. But what makes this death a particularly sad one is that “SOA” didn’t die because of its lack of technical merit; it died because it was misunderstood.  And so I too take a moment of silence to honor the memory of “SOA” with the rest of the enterprise IT community.

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