It had to happen, just when a space gets hot somebody had to state the obvious…"It's about the business." That's the case with IBM this week announcing eight industry-specific roadmaps for SOA. IBM also announced the results of a sponsored customer survey supporting their new strategy. From this article in Network World. "Rather than upcoming products from IBM, the eight roadmaps detail an implementation framewo It had to happen, just when a space gets hot somebody had to state the obvious…”It’s about the business.” That’s the case with IBM this week announcing eight industry-specific roadmaps for SOA. IBM also announced the results of a sponsored customer survey supporting their new strategy. From this article in Network World. “Rather than upcoming products from IBM, the eight roadmaps detail an implementation framework for six specific industries: one each for banking, insurance, retail and manufacturing, and two each for telecommunications and healthcare, which IBM says are its biggest customers. In most cases, the underlying mix of IBM application platform and SOA middleware products is not significantly different between the roadmaps, though IBM and some of its ISVs have developed industry-specific components that run on top of the platform.” “It’s the vertical dummy,” is what they are saying. Indeed, history is repeating itself here. After application integration got boring back in the EAI days, we moved into vertical specific solutions. At Mercator, for example, we made a nice business around HIPPA and the health care vertical, same thing with banking. IBM is attempting the same thing here by providing “industry-components.” Not sure this is neither innovative nor new; it’s really expected at this point. “The theory is that because SOA is all about service re-use, different enterprises within a given industry will be able to reuse the same services, even if their underlying applications and business processes are not identical. This strategy should be more flexible than monolithic single-industry approaches and simpler than building everything from scratch. ” This has always been to core notion of SOA, the ability to mix and match services, vertical or not, to form solutions. I would, however, argue based on what I’m finding that SOA is all about agility, with reuse being a side benefit and required for agility. But, I won’t make a big deal about that now. The notion that SOA is all about business is correct, but I’m not sure there is anything new about that. However, it’s the combination of business needs with the right best-of-breed technology that provides the maximum benefit. Moreover, considering services and processes that are specific to your business is just good architecture. I’m sure IBM knows that, as do we all. Software Development