Debate: Is SOA dead, or 'just resting?'

A Microsoft architect performs an SOA "autopsy"

Manes' treatise garnered a response from Microsoft software architect Denny Boynton, which may have been inspired in the interest of rebutting Manes, but ended up following a now-familiar channel. Respectfully, Boynton suggested that an "autopsy" be performed on SOA to determine not only the cause of death, but more to the point, whether the ideal is really dead. He wrote:

"Over the years, the term SOA has gained a reputation as being a kind of magical elixir, capable of curing bleeding budgets and making IT organizations young and virile again. It has been pitched by good intentioned people to be the ultimate solution for solving system integration challenges and as a holy grail of enterprise reuse. Additionally, many of the top industry analysts and journalists were saying very much the same kinds of things. These factors created a lot of top-down interest in SOA within large corporations, which means that there was a lot of money being put behind trying to implement SOA."

Boynton himself, he admits, was one of those put to work evangelizing the concept. But very soon, the project ballooned to an uncontrollable state. "Suddenly, we were trying to solve huge strategic problems with SOA," he wrote. "We were tasked with standardizing processes across several departments and business units. We were talking to dozens of people about services that would standardize key business capabilities in their part of the company. We were developing taxonomies, dictionaries, and registries to manage an eventual service environment."

So one probable cause of death, among a few others Boynton listed, was analogous to morbid obesity. The project of selling SOA grew larger than the process of doing it. But perhaps SOA isn't really dead, he went on, so much as it's in a "deep coma," and what remains of it in his view is something he calls a "service-oriented approach," that focuses on actions rather than activities -- or, as he put it, making a bowl of soup rather than attempting to boil the ocean.

Manes' and Boynton's posts drew a response from Progress Software architect David Bressler. Looking at first like another rebuttal to a rebuttal, and invoking the old Mark Twain line about the rumors of death, Bressler went on to proclaim SOA...well, semi-dead. Or perhaps, less dead than Manes put it, but more dead than Boynton.

Progress Software produces an SOA platform called Actional, which still boasts its SOA heritage. Though the company has professed SOA for what it is, a methodology, in recent years, it has found itself selling not the benefits of the concept, but rather the lack of benefits of not having the concept. A recent white paper advises business customers to assess their current IT infrastructure, to itemize those factors that could put the business "at risk."

As Bressler writes, his company finds itself moving away from the "message" of SOA, without sacrificing the substance of it:

"From our perspective here at Actional, the death of SOA from a marketing perspective (but not from a technical one!) has been going on for some time...Clearly, we're defocusing our SOA message. There's been a bit of disillusionment with SOA, and associating with it doesn't seem to be in vogue. Now, we're not the only ones to do this. One of our competitors has decided there are many 'hot topics' to grab onto and has a Flash animation scrolling through them all to make sure people realize their solution is as good for cloud, SaaS, Web 2.0, and composite apps, as it is for SOA.

"Our perspective is different. From our perspective, a SOA message is limiting. Fundamentally, we're about managing/controlling services, and anything built upon services, regardless of whether a SOA architecture is used or not. We (and I) believe that by messaging around SOA, organizations that are disillusioned will 'throw the baby out with the bathwater' when, in fact, huge ROI can be achieved with Actional."

The message here...looks a little familiar now: The problem isn't with thinking or even working in a particular way, but rather with talking about it that way. It's a lesson that household products manufacturers and politicians alike could give: If a product doesn't sell, call it something else and try again. It worked for the station wagon, professional wrestling, and Richard Nixon; it may yet work for services. Except for the ideal, the concepts, the technology, the protocols, the software, the merchandising, the publishing support, the advertising, the seminars, and maybe even the T-shirts, SOA is stone dead.