As a vendor, independent validation of your messages and positioning is always nice to see. That validation is even sweeter when it comes not from an analyst that you’ve briefed, or even your own customer, but rather from someone you’ve never met. I know that may sound a bit strange, but hear me out.
For sometime now, IONA has been talking about how the term SOA may be new, but the underlying principles have been around for quite sometime. In fact, we can look back 10 years to customers that were building SOA on Orbix, our CORBA technology. We’ve also been strong proponents of a SOA strategy that calls for incremental adoption, from both a cost and technology perspective. We like to say that when implementing SOA, customers should be able to “Think big, start small and scale fast.”
I came across a very interesting opinion piece written by Galen Gruman, identified as a US CIO. The article, The Real Challenge of SOA: Four Steps to Making Your Business Transform, sounds like a page from the IONA playbook. Many of the examples called out show that organizations have been "doing SOA" since before the term was made popular and highlights that many organizations are not falling for the "Big Bang" hype.
The first challenge called out advises, “deploy in pieces but create a long-term plan.” I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere before. The second piece of advice is to take governance seriously. We recently launced Artix Registry/Repository to address that exact issue, and to do so in a much more “active” way then is currently available. The third piece of advice, about rethinking the talent pool, makes a lot of sense, but doesn’t have a direct correlation to IONA. However, the fourth item, about applying SOA principles to data, is a big part of our recent acquisition of C24.
Read the article and let me know what you think.