At the end of the day, not much has changed in the last three weeks for SOA One of the things I’ve been noticing is that while budgets are slashed and SOA downsizing to more tactical purposes, projects are still under way, people are still moving the architecture ball forward, and it’s back to business with SOA. It does not surprise me, but considering all of the blogs and conjectures around the “SOA be bad” stuff, you would think that we’ve moved on to the next thing Truth be told, SOA is nothing more than an approach to architecture, and most enterprise architectures are still badly broken. We can sit around and talk about how complex and tough this is going to be to fix, perhaps quit, or get to work on even the smallest effort to move the ball forward. [ Take a slideshow tour of InfoWorld’s 2009 Technology of the Year Award winners in Applications, Middleware, and Data Management | Application Development | Platforms and Virtualization | Systems and Storage | Networking and Security ] Many small projects that you can call wins will also function to change the architecture. You just need to make sure you’re moving toward something that’s better than it was before, and keep the business in mind. If there is a struggle, it’s around improving the talent as well as the architecture. I’ve pointed out several times that there are not enough good SOA architects to go around. Training, mentoring, hiring — it’s a pretty easy solution. Now is the time to look into it; it actually reduces costs. So, for those of you who think that SOA has stopped, clearly that’s not the case. Concepts like SOA, while always debated, seem to be durable over time. Software Development