SOA is Vertical? When Was It Not Vertical?

I got a kick out of this article announcing a new “vertical SOA offering” from IBM.

“With the launch of something it calls the Retail Integration Framework (RIF), IBM this week gave prospective customers and its competitors a preview of what it has in store for SOA-enablement (define) in the coming year.

RIF isn’t a product but rather an enterprise software architecture, or framework, designed to help fill in the gaps between packaged software applications and legacy systems to help speed the implementation of new customer-focused strategies and technology initiatives in an SOA environment.”

Somebody is not getting SOA. Indeed, SOA is not predefined services and processes that adhere to some type of business pattern…it’s an architecture that’s able to support any type of business pattern. This is something that vendors pull often, the vertical-ization of technology to provide a differentiator. To be fair, I did this when I was the CTO of Mercator, in essence creating specific application integration solutions for healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and finance to sell integration. It worked. But, that was integration not SOA.

SOA, however, is a bit of a different animal. It’s really about creating something that changeable and agile, and the vertical component parts are really instances of solutions. In other words, SOA is the ability to configure the parts, and not necessary the parts itself. Or, it’s always a vertical solution since you can easily configure it into solutions, including verticals. Get it?

This is one of those things that I knew would come from the vendors eventually, but actually demonstrates a lack of understanding of the concept of SOA. However, I understand why they are doing it, and I’m sure a few of you will find it of value. This goes to the fact that I’ve stated many times: Architecture is difficult to understand and sell, thus many attempt to revert to gimmicks. Gimmicks don’t provide the value of architecture, unfortunately.