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By Michael Neubarth
It's been a year since Burton analyst Anne Thomas Manes launched a bombshell when she pronounced SOA dead on her burtongroup.com blog on January 5, 2009.
"Once thought to be the savior of IT," said Manes, "SOA instead turned into a great failed experiment-at least for most organizations."
Manes painted a dreary picture of SOA failure: "After investing millions, IT systems are no better than before. In many organizations, things are worse: costs are higher, projects take longer, and systems are more fragile than ever."
Companies had seen the writing on the wall, said Manes, and were abandoning SOA: "The people holding the purse strings have had enough. With the tight budgets of 2009, most organizations have cut funding for their SOA initiatives."
The recession economy, said Manes, put a nail in SOA's coffin. To make her point, a cartoon on her blog shows "the economy" as a meteor crashing into a dinosaur labeled "SOAsaurus" to cause its extinction.
"It's time to accept reality," said Manes. "SOA fatigue has turned into SOA disillusionment. Business people no longer believe that SOA will deliver spectacular benefits."
While pronouncing SOA dead, Manes declared the underlying concept of improving IT through services alive and well. She saw the SOA torch being passed to "the offspring" of SOA, the newer service-oriented technologies such as mashups, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing.
Dead Again
Declaring SOA dead was nothing new.
As Mark Little noted on markclittle.blogspot.com on January 7, 2009: "For the umpteenth time SOA is dead apparently. It's been shot so many times over the past year or so that you'd think it had a role in a Sam Peckinpah movie! However, maybe it's got 9 lives or you need to use a silver bullet, because each time it dies it keeps coming back."
Likewise, Joe McKendrick on zdnet.com on January 6, 2009, said that since he began writing his column in 2004 he has "heard SOA declared dead over and over again."
The disillusionment with SOA, however, seemed wider and deeper this time.
SOA Firestorm
Manes' pronouncement ignited a storm of debate across the blogosphere. While many disagreed, a large number of analysts, SOA specialists, enterprise architects, and other IT practitioners chimed in their support for her view that SOA was dead or dying. Manes seemed to have opened an SOA wound in which all the accumulated ills poured out. Tales, opinions, and anecdotes were aired. The trails of blood indicated that SOA, if not dead, was seriously wounded.
For example, said Craig Cameron from Web and Flo on Manes' blog on January 7, 2009: "I would say that SOA might not be dead yet but I am hearing of a lot of SOA projects being delayed or killed off. It might be more appropriate to say that SOA may be going into hibernation for a bit."
Said Francis Carden on Manes' blog on January 6, 2009: "SOA is about IT doing it right and IT should be doing it right whatever the acronym. However, doing it right takes too long, costs too much, risks complete failure and time has proven, can't always be done at all."
In a BriefingsDirect debate hosted by Dana Gardner on "How Dead SOA Really Is" on January 26, 2009, the transcript of which is on briefingsdirect.blogspot.com, Manes says:
"Certainly, lots of people have refuted my claim. At the same time, I've had at least as many people, and probably more, I am dead-on right. My goal with the blog post was to at least get the conversation going, and I think I managed to do that effectively."
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