David Millman made some thought provoking points in his post, SOA - We Got the Name Wrong. "So to shift the focus, I am renaming SOA from Service Oriented Architecture to Solution Oriented Architecture, this moves the problem front and center not the technology. Yes, we still need the various technologies to solve the solution: ESB for connection, mediation and control of the services, governance and visibility David Millman made some thought provoking points in his post, SOA – We Got the Name Wrong. “So to shift the focus, I am renaming SOA from Service Oriented Architecture to Solution Oriented Architecture, this moves the problem front and center not the technology. Yes, we still need the various technologies to solve the solution: ESB for connection, mediation and control of the services, governance and visibility to manage and control the complete solution, and data management to ensure that all the information we use is correct. But we are now also using these and others in a combined manner to reach a complete solution.” Okay, I think I get that. However, the term “solutions oriented” has a pretty heavy list of applications over the years, and I’m pretty sure that the name will confuse things even more. I coined a term “Solutions Oriented Middleware” in the 90s, when I was CTO of SAGA (now a part of SoftwareAG), and I’m pretty sure I picked up “solutions oriented” in my tenure as a consultant in the early 90s. Who knows, who cares? To David’s point, however, the term service oriented architecture does lead many to believe that Web services are always the way. That’s not really true, indeed services can be deployed using any number of technology approaches, languages, and standards. I never saw SOA as a Web services only approach. It’s really just a way of doing architecture, no biggy there. If you’ve seen my posts and listened to my Podcasts, you know that I believe that SOA and enterprise architecture will morph together over time, since both are really more about architecture than anything else. However, we love new TLAs, and SOA stuck before other ways of describing this approach. I guess you can call it anything. David concludes: “Or, perhaps, we should look at changing the acronyms completely and SOA becomes SOB – Service Oriented Business (or what you do if it fails), but my new favorite is BaaS – Business as a Service where companies would now be a service or services, but I guess nothing is that new because I can Google BaaS and get references to that too.” Not sure it really matters what you call it, as long as you do it right. Software Development