Semantic Viewpoint : The Global SOA Conspiracy

The Global SOA Conspiracy: The Emperor Has No Clothes

By Zachary Alexander
The IT Investment Architect®

SOA Conspiracy Image Every school-age child knows the story of “The Emperor’s New Suit.” In this story, one lone child has the courage to acknowledge that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. Like in the famous children’s story, many people are scared to say anything negative about service oriented architectures. All we hear is that we need to stay the course. Now is the time to admit that SOA-based applications don’t make economic sense.

This story is perpetrated by a global conspiracy of government-business consultants bent on growing a global SOA empire. Government-business consultants are not giving small business executives what they want. Government-business consultants don’t provide information technology (IT) investment options which solve discrete business problems. Instead, they are trying to convince small business executives that they have to take an enterprise architecture viewpoint and over engineer every IT investment.

Government-business consultants aren’t giving small business executives the kinds of solutions that help them treat On-Demand Consumers like peers. In fact, development and deployment of any SOA-based application should be a non-starter for all but the largest government agencies or companies in the era of the Web 2.0 platform. The Web 2.0 platform is the next generation of the World Wide Web. The Web 2.0 platform supports protocols that revolve around the “less is more” philosophy. Contrary to what the government-business consultants say the complexity of creating and maintaining SOA-based applications will be lost on On-Demand Consumers that already have Web 2.0-based technologies.

The small business IT investment community is now dealing with high bill rates from consultants for solutions that don’t meet their particular needs. Government-business consultants are trying to use the resources provided by their large government contracts to pressure and hype solutions that don’t work for small businesses. Purchasing a SOA-based application is much like purchasing a mainframe. The bulk of the costs are up-front costs associated with setting up the initial infrastructure. In the mainframe paradigm, once you’ve bought the big boxes and built the computer rooms, adding individual applications are inexpensive. In the SOA paradigm, once you’ve sunk money into building the core standards-based services that don’t interoperate then integrating applications that consume these services should be inexpensive.

There have always been computer investment trends that have detracted from an IT organization’s ability to deliver new economic value. Computer investment trends like Y2K and Sarbanes-Oxley Act have diverted much needed funds from new development. The small business community would be well advised to abandon SOA-applications and move on to the next generation of web development.