Analyst firm ZapThink issued a report that included its predictions for the fate of service-oriented architectures in 2005. The authors kept it short and sweet, listing but three items: *WS-I Gets Going or Gets Out — The group has yet to deliver on the necessary profiles for security, process, and reliability – three significant minefields full of specifications that lack cohesive vendor support and have widespread disagreement. In order for the WS-I to prove their relevance, the group must not only produce profiles that cover those areas, but must also garner enough respect from vendors and implementers to make their word law in the SOA nation.*Companies will Make More Money on SOA Services than on SOA Products — In many ways that was true of the early years, but increasingly there is a real market for both products as well as implementation services for SOA. The past nine months or so have seen a dramatic increase in the number of professional service firms that have either opened a new division solely focused on SOA or significantly expanded an existing practice. *ESB Use it or Lose it — Once a vaguely-defined term that nevertheless carried with it some specific functionality requirements and implementation implications, the ESB term now refers to a hodgepodge of mostly unrelated products, disparate feature and function sets, and confused vendor product messaging that seems to be more a definition of chaos than a specific functionality set. Some ESB vendors include a message bus infrastructure, while others don’t. Some ESB vendors provide business-process modeling and runtime capabilities, while others simply provide an event-driven runtime infrastructure. More gravely, some vendors are distancing themselves from the idea that ESB is even a product category – but rather an architectural framework for SOA. As a result, ESB has now come to mean “any technology that is required to implement an SOA.” As such, without a more concrete definition of the capabilities and functionality that an ESB provides, the term will either become meaningless, or will be given a more narrowly defined and concise definition. So, in 2005, the ESB term will either shift to a realistic, understandable, and meaningful meaning, or disappear from the SOA lexicon forever. The bottom line is that the thus far ballyhooed and acronym’d terms and technologies need to move out of the abstract and into the concrete during 2005. Software Development