Just back from some great days in Stockholm, at a SOA conference there. Great event, great people - at the end of the event the organisers asked me to prepare an executive summary, which I'm attaching inline below. In a nutshell: SOA is maturing nicely, but EDA and REST have a big part to play in SOA solutions.
The "SOA for the Services Industry" conference took place this year in Stockholm, bringing together battle-hardened SOA practitioners, industry visionaries and solution providers, under the banner theme "Beyond the Introduction: Managing SOA for a Decade". The event lived up to its promise of bringing to bear the idealism and purity of the SOA architectural vision with on-the-ground experience and real-life use-cases. IONA Technologies was delighted to sponsor and chair this event.
A recurring theme that emerged throughout the presentations, panel discussion and conversations throughout the event was that "SOA is just part of the solution". Many of the case studies, drawn from the airline, financial services and telecom industries, showed that while a SOA-based architecture formed the backbone of their thinking, Event Driven Architecture (EDA) also formed a key role. One delegate captured this succinctly, saying "our business is event-driven ". Gartner's proposal for a "SOA 2.0", which emerged mid-last year amidst much debate and mixed acceptance, declares EDA to be a key differentiator from its predecessor; however, some delegates felt that EDA is already a de facto part of existing SOA solutions. Case studies showed also that the principals behind REST architecture, as defined in Roy Fielding's thesis, are also immensely important in designing distributed scalable systems.
Delegates found some agreement on the idea that SOA does not always have to be an enterprise endeavor - the principals and technologies behind SOA can be applied at an application or project level to good benefit. In fact, one delegate was keen to point out that the feudal nature of his organization meant that any attempt to impose an enterprise-wide methodology was simply doomed to fail for political reasons alone. By applying SOA principals in the small there was a greater change of building a groundswell and ultimate acceptance. Applying all elements of SOA architecture, from services creation and deployment right through to orchestration and choreography, just "for the sake of it", is clearly misguided; one delegate went as far as to say "It's almost better to have no SOA at all, than a badly done SOA".
The use of SOA as a business facilitator, supporting and easing mergers, acquisitions and outsourcing programmes was demonstrated in a number of presentations in the telecoms and airline sectors. The importance of governance and organizational training in achieving SOA success was also stressed. All were agreed that SOA is perhaps now far more a people problem than a technical problem: aligning an organization to understand and capitalize on SOA, or rather, aligning a SOA to facilitate and support an organization’s DNA, may be the greatest challenge.
And, in the long term, remember that a SOA is "not just for Christmas": SOA practitioners must consider the cost of ongoing deployment, evolution and maintenance of SOA systems. Planning for success requires strategic thinking around version control, ownership and scaling is crucial for success in the long term.
The event was organized by Inoventa; for more information on the event, and to download conference materials, go to http://www.inoventa.com/