How can you really tell that a technology trend or computing methodology has gone mainstream? You might think it’s when nearly every vendor is touting their own take on how customers can get in on the action, or when the analyst community pumps out reports on the subject by the dozen. I suppose those would be good guesses. If every vendor and all the analysts are talking about it, it must be for real…right?
I’d argue that those activities point not to mainstream adoption, but rather to early stage hype. And we’ve all been facing this hype around SOA for the past few years. Interestingly, it’s taken almost ten years for the hype around SOA to catch up with the early deployments. Here at IONA, we have customers who have been using our technology to deploy service-oriented systems for more than a decade. But that’s a story for a different day, and one that, in all reality, has been told many times over, and not just by us. A quick search of Gartner.com will back up that claim – just look for a report on Credit Suisse from 2002.
The really powerful proof that a technology or computing methodology, such as SOA, has gone mainstream is when the conventional business press starts paying attention. Even more so than the enterprise IT publications written for IT executives, general interest business publications need to tell customer stories. I came across this great article (registration required) in today's Wall Street Journal by Christopher Lawton, one of the publication's Silicon Valley reporters. The story highlights several customers touting the business benefits they've achieved by deploying SOA.
Unfortunately, no IONA cusotmers were included in the piece -- I'll have to work on that. But that doesn't mean we don't have customers generating real business benefit from using our software in business critical SOA deployments. Click the links to see how Aepona, Trenitalia and DZ Bank are using Artix to their advantage.