I came across this article by Colin Beasty posted yesterday, "SOA Comes at a Cost." The good news: "Service-oriented architecture (SOA) will be used in more than 50 percent of new mission-critical operational applications and business processes designed in 2007 and in more than 80 percent by 2010, according to a new study by Gartner. SOA has dramatically grown in popularity, and adoption has expanded across vert I came across this article by Colin Beasty posted yesterday, “SOA Comes at a Cost.” The good news: “Service-oriented architecture (SOA) will be used in more than 50 percent of new mission-critical operational applications and business processes designed in 2007 and in more than 80 percent by 2010, according to a new study by Gartner. SOA has dramatically grown in popularity, and adoption has expanded across vertical industries, geographies, and organization sizes.” SOA is growing, I get that, I see that. The bad news: “However, the number of failed projects has also grown, and organizations have discovered that SOA benefits come at a cost as the challenges associated with its adoption become more apparent. ‘New software products for SOA have hit the market, but given their immaturity, have disappointed users in terms of reliability, performance, and productivity,’ says Frank Kenney, a research director for Gartner. ‘SOA principles have been applied too rigidly, and this has led to unsatisfactory outcomes as projects became too costly and didn’t meet deadlines.’ ” I’m not sure this is as much bad news as it seems. Indeed SOA is hard; people implementing SOA are just now figuring that out. I think the downside, at least in my practice, is the reality of sitting down and figuring this stuff out after all of the hype of the last few years. In other words, you’re sold one world of SOA, and you find out it’s something very different. Not bad different, just much more complex and labor intensive. Thus, they don’t dial that into the project plans, are a bit shocked at the amount of work, and thus miss deadlines. SOA is not a bolt on thing, it’s a systemic change in the way you drive your enterprise architecture. That’s neither trivial, nor easy, but it is worth it. “However, Kenney points out that this is not bad news. Organizations are utilizing this approach and adopting the relevant enabling technologies. ‘Large numbers of successes have been reported, and no major conceptual flaw has been discovered in SOA,’ he says. ‘Organizations should aggressively invest in SOA as it will rapidly become the architectural foundation for virtually every new business-critical application.'” Software Development