SOA and Web 2.0

I’m off to NYC again to speak at the SOA World Conference and Expo. My talk is entitled: ‘Web 2.0’? – It’s the Universal SOA taking place tomorrow, Tuesday, at 12:40. If you’re at the event stop by. I’m just doing a session, not a keynote, so I’ll be “hit and run” for that conference.

Here is the session description:

“In this session we’ll talk about the notion of the Universal SOA, and how to prepare your SOA to see the outside world, and the emerging Web. It’s clear that many of the services we consume and manage going forward will be services that exist outside of the enterprise, such as subscription services from guys like Salesforce.com, or perhaps emerging Web services marketplaces. This is ‘outside-in’ SOA, in essence reusing service in an enterprise not created by that enterprise, much as we do today with information on the Web. Thus, those services outside of the enterprise existing on the Internet create a ‘Universal SOA’ – ready to connect to your enterprise SOA, perhaps providing more value. This is nothing new, by the way; we’ve been talking Universal SOA for some time now, at least the notion, and we are just seeing bits and pieces appearing today.”

This is not a new subject, we’ve been trying to link SOA to the emerging Web for a while, and as time passes, the links are becoming more of a reality. Indeed, I think we’ll see big movements in the next few months where the larger Web players, such as search engines, larger retailers, and some innovative startups will quickly move into the service provider space. Thus, with more services out there to leverage, the need to build an infrastructure that’s able to consume and manage these services will drive SOA in many enterprises.

So, we’ll see SOAs built in two major directions: First, those that are building SOA as an enterprise architecture improvement project, fixing fragile and static architecture so that IT can finally align with business. Second, those enterprises that are building SOA as a point of consumption and a point of production for services, which is really around the influence of Web 2.0. Of course, we’ll see many SOAs that are looking to address both.

Those that are claiming to define the “new links for SOA and Web 2.0” are being a bit silly. Web services, for instance, where not really an enterprise concept, but a new Web concept from the beginning. Same can be said for UDDI, and some of the early test cases around SOA…all Web-based. So, we have a clear pattern of proving something on the Web and then dragging it into the enterprise. Indeed the Web continues to influence more than we know, and the next generation Web will continue this pattern.