In doing my weekly reading, I came across the transcript around the July 27th Podcast, Briefings Direct, hosted by Dana Gartner. Just a few comment to share around the future of SOA, and especially my comments during my keynote presentation at the Open Group conference held in Austin last month. "Our topic today is "The Future of SOA." We want to take a look at what might happen if a lot of the things we've been In doing my weekly reading, I came across the transcript around the July 27th Podcast, Briefings Direct, hosted by Dana Gartner. Just a few comment to share around the future of SOA, and especially my comments during my keynote presentation at the Open Group conference held in Austin last month. “Our topic today is “The Future of SOA.” We want to take a look at what might happen if a lot of the things we’ve been considering for SOA actually happen.” One of the interesting things we heard this morning from Dave Linthicum was that he’s anticipating that, in as few as five years, the role of enterprise architect and the role of SOA architect will meld. I thought that was a little ambitious, and I wonder if I could put that to our panel. Before we get into the future of SOA, we should actually determine when the future of SOA will be important.” From Beth Gold-Bernstein: Five years is definitely ambitious. All the polls that we’ve done at ebizQ have shown that the market is really in the early stages of adoption. From my point of view, the sooner the SOA architect’s role is rolled into enterprise architecture in terms of governance the better. It is a subpart. And it is, as Dave said, best practice in architecture. We’ve known that for a couple of decades, actually.” I think I agree with Beth here, indeed we are at the early stages of adoption. However, you also need to remember, this is the computer business, thus 5 years is a long time, and like other architectural concepts, such as B2B, and EAI, SOA will both influence and drive architecture in 5 years, and therefore the crossover will be complete. Trust me. And, InfoWorld’s own Eric Knorr: “Dave had it exactly right this morning. It’s something that will be subsumed within enterprise architecture, as a whole. It’s part of the ongoing saga of making IT more efficient. If you listened to Dave’s keynote this morning, he also mentioned that out of the implementations that he had seen, 80 percent were in trouble. Adoption, on a broad level, is still relatively at an early stage right now. So there is a certain danger right now in SOA in terms of the acronym and its impact on the industry. It maybe another one of these initiatives that looks like it’s going to be very successful. You go through the hype curve, and then it begins to fall away. When that happens, I think it will be absorbed into enterprise architecture. The basic principles won’t go away. Everybody is gravitating toward service orientation within the enterprise, and there are all sorts of reasons why that makes sense from management and architecture reasons, redundancy development, and other things. That will continue to go on, but as a trend, it may have a definite life span — and that may be only a couple of more years.” Actually, my first thoughts around this notion were from a discussion with Eric at the last InfoWorld SOA Conference. Indeed, buzzwords have a lifecycle, but good ideas don’t. I think SOA will become one of those things that sets the groundwork for better things to come within IT. I hope we can stop struggling tactically, and begin thinking strategically about this stuff. It’s the only way to win the battles and the war. Software Development