Dan Sholler

It is always amazing how something so obvious can become so confusing. Shared services are shared services. SOA is about creating software as shared services. All of the developments around virtualization, and the infrastructure utility (Gartner subscriptions required) are about changing our infrastructure and operations management to shared services… and guess what? Private clouds (or whatever we end up calling them) are about combining the thing that the infrastructure folks are doing with the things  that the app folks are doing.

So the shocking truth is that similar concepts are being applied across different aspects of the IT industry, and the resulting systems can effectively combine those concepts to increase their leverage and value. This is all to the good. Of course, we all have a lot to learn about exactly how and what to do.. but as with all innovations, the chatter will start to die down as we all get our hands dirty implementing this in practice. It is this effect that has prompted some of the recent "death of SOA" discussions in the blogsphere, and no doubt will spawn the next great buzzword. (This is exactly what is predicted by the Hype Cycle, and documented in our Hype Cycle on Application Architecture)

In the meantime, we all need to focus on the key things that maximize the benefits of adopting those practices, designs and approaches. As I speak to Gartner’s clients about SOA, that is what they are all trying to achieve. I have no doubt that they will combine SOA with virtualization and other changes in the infrastructure to produce better, more flexible, less costly systems. The hype about SOA may be dying away, but the practice is just getting under way, and we have a great deal more to learn there. We have a lot of research about these practices going on right now… and at least for the moment, it will still be called SOA…although who knows..even I and my colleagues may succumb to "private cloud" or the buzzword de jure.. no one is immune, after all…