SOA promises enormous benefits but is anyone realizing them?Analyst Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, asked this question Thursday during a presentation on SOA at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Francisco.SOA, she said, offers benefits such as aligning IT with the business and providing flexibility and agility. But it is a long road to get to the benefits, she said. “My contention is an awful lot of companies are really not ready to do SOA,” Manes said. She stressed SOA is an enterprise architecture design methodology and is not about technology. “SOA is how how you think about solving the problem,” Manes said. Vendors say to buy their new products for SOA, even if a lot of them are the same products that have been around for 15 years but with a couple of new features, Manes said. Technology only provides the raw materials, she said. “It’s up to you to use those raw materials correctly,” Manes said.She also questioned the viability of the WS-* Web services specifications. “The question is, is WS-* (spoken as ws star) the true path to SOA,” Manes said. WS-* has been viewed as burdened with excessive complexity, according to Manes. She noted, though, that WS-* specifications such as WS-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) are now being ratified. She advised attendees not to abandon WS-*.Manes has endorsed the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) Basic Profile. REST (Representational State Transfer) also has gained traction in Web services and SOA, she noted. But the REST design model is unfamiliar to many developers, she noted. In another presentation at the conference, Kevin Kosienski, enterprise architect at MassMutual Financial Group, concurred with Manes about SOA. “We view SOA as an architectural style. It’s not a technology,” Kosienski said. SOA involves converting complex systems into simpler sets of services and assembling them as enterprise-class applications, he said. MassMutual views SOA as an architectural style that will enable a more flexible, adaptable business model, said Kosienski. MassMutual’s SOA leverages AmberPoint management software. SOA management tackles security tasks and alleviates developers from having to deal with these issues, Kosienski said. Also in the SOA arena this week, a BEA Systems official stressed the human factor of SOA in a keynote presentation at the SOA World conference in New York, the official said when interviewed afterward.During the presentation, Rob Levy, BEA CTO, said human ability has been pushed out of the IT process through increased efficiency and mechanization of processes. But humans nonetheless find a way to surpass all this, he said. Now, Web 2.0 and social computing concepts have emerged. The next generation of SOA applications needs to cater to human nature and collaboration, he said. “We believe the next wave of SOA will bring Web 2.0-like capabilities into the enterprise,” Levy said. “In a collaborative environment, everybody has an opinion and eventually, the opinion that is correct will prevail,” he said. By bringing enveryone into an SOA lifecycle, it will take less time to implement an idea, said Levy. To bolster the human factor in SOA, BEA in July plans to deliver its three social computing products under the AquaLogic nameplate. These include: Ensemble, enabling Web developers to build developer-oriented mashups; Pages, for business users to build mashups for business situations, and Pathways, for forming social networks in an enterprise context.“These are tools that allow things like wikis inside the enterprise,” Levy said. Anchoring BEA’s platform is AquaLogic Repository, providing governance capabilities enabling the IT department to oversee what is happening in an SOA. Technology Industry