SOA/WOA Continues to Gain Momentum on the Web

As I’m heading out to the Web 2.0 Conference this week, we seem to be riding a new wave…or the combination of two waves really…the Web and SOA.

As Dana Gardner points out in his most recent post, the amount of thought leadership that’s been going on around this concept has increased exponentially. Dana points out recent posts by myself, Joe McKendrick, Tony Baer, Dana, Phil Wainewright, and Burton Group’s Anne Manes.

“Moreover, others have been also developing concepts and methodologies for providing the means for enterprises to exploit pure web resources for advancing developer productivity and business process extensibility.”

Keep in mind, as Dana points out, that:

“The logic is not to supplant or dismiss Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but rather to examine how WOA — also known as lightweight, Web 2.0 applications development and deployment — should provide an onramp to and stepping stone for SOA generally. WOA and SOA together — in a harmony that unlocks both the power of cloud computing and of traditional enterprise architectures — presents a very interesting future indeed.”

That sums up the way I’m looking at it as well.

The general notion is that the Web provides another location for core business processes using outsourced infrastructure, and reusable business processes accessible on-demand. These Web-born systems/architectures provide better development speed, access to pre-built resources, and much more value when compared with traditional enterprise approaches. Thus, why SOA is proving itself on the platform of the Web more so than within the enterprise these days…it’s just faster, easier, and provides more initial ROI.

Keep in mind that enterprise SOA projects are still progressing. However, the use of Web-born resources, such as on-demand Web services, SaaS, and on-demand tools such as Google’s new App Engine is creating more of a grass roots movement towards SOA/WOA. This movement is moving from the developers to the architects, not from the architects to the developers. The former is much faster.

The same pattern was seen with the rise of SaaS. Salesforce.com did not sell to IT. IT would block any attempt to leverage remotely hosted applications. Instead they sold to those who had the pain, and needed a quick and easy solution, and SaaS filled that need nicely.

IT only adopted SaaS after there were so many SaaS users within their enterprise that they wanted to subsume and control the use of SaaS. I’ve personally seen IT leaders pushback hard on SaaS, then change their tune once they’ve seen the value, or are forced to see it. There is always a not-invented-here issue with this technology, and clearly you can no longer hug your server. Those who where in denial are now coming around.

The adoption of Web-born SOA, or WOA, is finding a similar adoption pattern. Composite applications will be, and are being built within emerging on-demand tools such as Google App Engine. Those applications will need information, services, and APIs, also delivered on-demand over the Web. Moreover, enterprises will seek to externalized existing enterprise data to WOA as well and thus user management and security will remain a core issue. Indeed, we could see many enterprises with more business processes running outside of the firewall than in, in just a few years.

Once that trend is clear, as it’s becoming today, we’ll find that more sophisticated core architectural technology will become more mature on the Web as well. This includes SOA governance on-demand, service directories inclusive of visual and non-visual services available for mashing up into solution. In essence, process-by-process, application-by-application, and service-by-service, we’re re-hosting core business processes and services on the Web.

While science fiction just a few years ago, it’s happening today guys.