Commentary on SOA Standards

David Sprott (CBDi Forum) recently published commentary "On SOA Standards". I believe you need to be a member to access the full text of the editorial.

However,a couple of very relevant excerpts:
“...SOA is very different to most of the IT trends that come sweeping through our industry from time to time. First as an architectural concept SOA is not primarily technology driven, rather it is technology enabled. Second SOA adoption is inevitably situation specific because the needs of each enterprise are driven by the existing and future business and technology situation. Third the real impact of SOA will only be realized by most enterprises when a critical mass of content as reusable services is available either from internal sources or from enterprise application vendors such as SAP and Oracle.”

“The core principle of SOA is about standardization and reuse of common functionality in many different contexts, in a structure that is architected and engineered to be evolutionary and to have a managed level of adaptability.”

“In a very short time, probably less than one year...vendors will find a new focus for their marketing dollars. But in the real world enterprises, systems integrators and developers will be embracing SOA practices and techniques and building them into their kit bag because it makes sense.
• Architects and developers will use concepts of contractual separation and reuse because it makes sense.
• Enterprises and their suppliers will embrace SOA, progressively solving critical business problems in a better way than they might have done previously:
• Introducing core business services to enable consistent data and business policy,
• Using process services to separate the process and application layers, and
• Creating utility services to deliver very high levels of reuse across the enterprise.”

We're a long way from the days of the Captain Picard in the Starship Enterprise simply telling the computer "Access data banks" to get a perfectly relevant response. However, there is growing recognition that standardization, re-use, and business needs should drive technology rather than hype driving technology. As we continue to head in that direction, long after the the latest and greatest of SOA products are phased out of technology petting zoos and into technology archives, we'll get closer and closer to the ultimate objectives of SOA.