Top Ten SOA Prinicples

We covered the view The landscape for SOA is wide open and it shall be influencing virtually every aspect of software development and application bringing changes in the nature of usage, development - encompassing customer, product vendor and service offerings.The view that oracle's approach itself is a Frankenstein warrants definite attention.The view that Oracle may not have a single strategy with SOA definitely warrants a full fledged response from Oracle. The prevailing opinion seems to be that oracle is cobbling together many disparate and unrelated technologies and then give it to their customers pretending that it's a single product.While covering on the topic of complexity we observed that the goal of SOA isn’t interoperability; if that is all you want then sprinkle a few Web Service interfaces on your existing design and you will have opened up your application to all platforms - but you will not necessarily have benefited from SOA. We also noted that SOA deployment are huge exercises, if implemented in the right spirit. Like any other enterprise initiative, SOA deployment needs careful planning, deep collaboration, lots and lots of change management and a measurable objectives with well defined checkpoints identified in between are essential in any SOA deployment engagement. While covering Jeff Schneider’s perspective of four big SOA models we observed that no big vendor today has been able to clearly articulate their SOA approach and how these may transform theirs & customer landscape in say five years form now quite convincingly but Jeff has spotted the right traits.

Judith Hurwitz, CEO, Hurwitz & Associates correlates trends between the rise and adoption of ecommerce and SOA and lists Top Ten SOA Principles:

1. SOA is real. It is not a quick fix & is a ten year journey that requires considerable planning, just like an e-commerce implementation.
2. SOA will only work if organizations lead with manageability. SOA by its very nature demands the aggregation of IP from many different sources. Scalability within SOA will come from management – not development.
3. SOA will only work if it is implemented within the context of a business process orientation.
4. SOA is predicated on leveraging business services that represent the component parts of your business.
5. SOA requires a container that creates a composite application.
6. SOA requires standards across all vendors implementations of SOA. and a few more. A good collection , I should say.