On April 12, 1996 Roy Schulte of Gartner had published two research notes :
- “‘Service Oriented’ Architectures, Part 1”,
- “‘Service Oriented’ Architectures, Part 2”.
(Gartner research notes were limited to only 2 pages at that time, so some had to spill onto a sequel.)
With that, the 25 year history of SOA begun. It was little noticed at first, gained popularity for some time, declared dead, and finally became a ubiquitous presence in all professional computing. Today, Google search for “service-oriented architecture” fetches nearly 3,000,000 references, plus 16,000,000 for “microservice”, the modern form of SOA. (“SOA” itself gets 65,000,000, but that includes “Son Of Anarchy” and who’d dare to compete with that.)
The PDF copy of the historic originals is here:
Or for those with Gartner access:
Roy moved on to develop such concepts as Integration Brokers, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Real-Time Enterprise, Complex Event Processing (CEP) and many others. But SOA in its fundamental simplicity and elegance, more than anything else, found its place in the history of computing.
Congratulations Roy, and thank you.
(P.S. Although my name appears on the first document, I was a master’s apprentice at the time and the credit for this work must be fully given to Roy.)
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Yefim, I have been so fortunate in my career to have worked very closely with Roy, you and others who have shaped important concepts in our market and taught me so much about our industry and the technologies that shape it over the years. I am even more fortunate to have worked with Roy, you and others who are genuinely very kind, good people who have taught me very much more important lessons about how to work and how to live. Although I was not even in the industry when you published this foundational research–that would come the following year–it was readily apparent to me as soon as I started working with you and Roy in 2000 when I entered the application integration market that you two were–and are–special. You both helped me grow my knowledge enough that I think I was even able to share a couple of insights with the two of you over the years! And finally, although I have had the pleasure of working with dozens of Gartner analysts in my (nearly) 25 year career, my work with Roy, Massimo Pezzini, Daryl Plummer and you is the work I am proudest of and have the fondest memories of…so thank you. And congratulations on the milestone!