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Oversold, Overhyped
There is a widespread feeling that SOA was oversold by vendors and analysts. Mike Alvarez summed up the feeling when on Manes' blog on January 15, 2009, saying, "The term 'SOA' ended up being an overly-hyped term created by software and analyst firms to get some air time and sell products."
In the same vein, software architect Salam Khan on his blog on aslamkhan.net on March 16, 2009, wrote: "Is SOA dead? Not yet but the vendors are doing a great job of killing it with implementations."
Moreover, he said: "Is SOA heavyweight? No. But the vendors make it very, very heavyweight because that is the core of their economic model."
In "A SOA PostMortem" on Application Development Trends magazine's adtmag.com site on March 3, 2009, author John K. Waters reports Manes as saying that, unsurprisingly, most of the negative responses to her blog came from vendors.
However, as Waters tells us, one vendor executive who agreed with Manes was Mulesource CTO and co-founder Ross Mason. As Waters relates:
"The reason that SOA has become almost a dirty word, Mason says, is that too many vendors have picked it up as a marketing tool to sell products. 'They've diluted the message for short-term gain,' Mason says. "' SOA has nothing about product. It has nothing to do with technology, really, though technology is an enabler. But the promise of SOA is founded on sound principles.' "
"The truth is," Mason is quoted as saying, "the people who failed to deliver on the promise of SOA were the vendors."
Sharing this view was Philip Stander, who on Manes' blog on September 3, 2009, wrote:
"My opinion: The major product vendors once again got in the way with overcomplicated SOA stacks and got in with so much focus on technology (product) implementation that budgets were spent before legacy business functions could be migrated to a SOA-compliant architecture."
ESB Is Not SOA
The causes attributed to SOA's death are many. Among them is the view that the association of ESBs with SOA was a major factor in undermining SOA's success.
Said Dr. Yigal Gur on Manes' blog on January 15, 2009: "It is quite unfortunate that the SOA - which is the pattern of EA (enterprise architecture), became a synonym of ESB in the heads of CIOs."
Supporting this view was Jason Bloomberg, who in his Zapflash in October 2007 said: "Not every integration vendor has taken this route, but many have. You can identify them when their sales people make statements like "ESBs are necessary for SOA."
Similarly, said Jim Kita on geekswithblogs.net on January 6, 2009: "If anyone has heard me speak, you will understand, though, that SOA is not a product (specific application server) or a specific technology (like ESB)."
Said Piet Jan Baarda in his whitepaper "Your SOA Needs a Business Case" in November 2008: "On one hand some software suppliers will lead you to believe that the acquisition of an
Enterprise Service Bus or the development of a number of Web Services is sufficient to be able to say 'Yes, we do SOA!.' Many customers happily join them and count on the next miracle tool to make all their information problems go away without the need to do complex things like changing the organization or the current way of working."
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