Sustainable SOA

Here at the InfoWorld home office, we’re in the feverish last stages of preparation for next week’s two-day SOA Executive Forum, our sixth foray into wild, woolly SOA-land. If you’re planning to be in the New York area on May 16-17, I encourage you to attend. As of this writing, we still have a few seats left.

For those who can’t attend the event, reading this week’s cover story, “Organic SOA: Developing a sustainable lifecycle”, should give a taste of what you’re missing. As with the SOA Executive Forum itself, the emphasis here is on practical, usable advice, not high-falutin’ theory.

“Developing a service-oriented architecture project is an organic process that should involve business stakeholders and technologists across the organization,” says Executive Editor Eric Knorr, who oversaw the article. “But as with many organic processes, there’s no commonly agreed upon road map, and there’s little consensus on overall processes.” To remedy that problem, InfoWorld drew on the talents of our own Real World SOA blogger — and contributing editor — David S. Linthicum, who developed a full-fledged lifecycle for SOA development.

This isn’t the kind of thing you’ll see anywhere else, partly because SOA is still young, and partly because few organizations have gone the entire way through a large-scale SOA implementation, as Linthicum has done. To fill in the details of the SOA lifecycle, Linthicum called on two other InfoWorld contributing editors, domain experts James Borck, who specializes in business processes, and Phil Windley, an identity and governance guy. Together, these three dig deep into the details of how to plan, analyze, design, deploy, and manage an SOA in a way that’s both sustainable and repeatable.

Of course, all the processes and lifecycles in the world won’t help without the right products to make everything work. Fortuntely, the product landscape is maturing quickly, with larger vendors buying smaller ones at a rapid clip in an effort to offer end-to-end SOA. This week, for instance, SOA Software purchased Blue Titan, a leader in Web services networking (see “SOA Software bulks up with Blue Titan,”). This comes on the heels of a string of similar acquisitions, with big shots such as IBM and Mercury filling out their product offerings by snapping up well-respected but smaller companies.

Consolidation, it seems, is now the name of the game in the SOA software space. The result of all this frantic merger and acquisition activity: Suddenly there are a number of products, from well-established vendors, capable of addressing the entire SOA lifecycle.

The lineup of products is here. The road map is getting clearer. This happy confluence of events can only bode well for future SOA projects.