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The SOA Forecast for 2007
Document ID: ZAPFLASH-200713 | Document Type: ZapFlash
By Ronald <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Schmelzer
Posted: Jan. 03, 2007
For those in the United States, 2007 has started out with a bang - two major
snow storms in the Rocky Mountains and a persistent warm front that's
keeping the entire East Coast in unusually warm weather for this time of
year. Even more so, it's football season in the US and both the New England
Patriots and Baltimore Ravens are in the playoffs - the two teams
representing ZapThink's two office locations. Of course, speaking
metaphorically, with regards to SOA, 2006 ended with a bang and 2007 is
already showing considerable warmth and competitive vigor. ZapThink has seen
SOA take off even more aggressively than we anticipated at the beginning of
2006, and all indications show that SOA strength will be further reinforced
and expanded in 2007 to many corners of the IT environment, throughout the
world and in many different industries. And so, during this season of sultry
winter weather and competition, it is time to evaluate our predictions from
the previous year and forecast the architectural and competitive climate for
SOA in 2007.
2006 SOA Predictions: Four for Four!
In last year's <http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZAPFLASH-20051228>
2005 SOA Scorecard and 2006 Predictions ZapFlash, we predicted that
companies would move beyond their tentative SOA projects to more substantial
projects leveraging emerging best practices for all aspects of the Service
lifecycle. More specifically, we bemoaned the fact that companies were
thinking too much about having a bunch of Services (so-called "ABOS") and
not enough about an architecture oriented towards the ongoing evolution of
those Services. We surmised that companies would soon wake up to the fact
that SOA demanded true enterprise architecture activities, artifacts, and
skills, and less-so just rote software development and technology
implementation. Indeed, we believed that one side-effect of the maturation
of SOA projects was that companies would finally give proper emphasis to the
use of a registry/repository throughout the Service lifecycle, effective
Service lifecycle management, and a comprehensive IT governance framework.
We predicted that an emerging set of next generation SOA projects would put
some enterprises in technology leadership positions, and indeed, it seems
that all of those predictions came to pass in the year preceding.
Continuing on the thread discussed earlier with regards to maturing SOA
implementations, we also predicted the SOA governance space was ready for a
major shake-out and consolidation. Boy, were we right on target! 2006 bore
witness to the frenzied acquisition of all things governance and registry
related as well as the emergence of Service lifecycle vendors as the next
must-have technology in any SOA infrastructure portfolio.
Our next prediction was that emphasis would shift from being solely Service
provider centric to an increase in awareness, and implementation, of Service
consumer-centric tooling and methodologies. For sure, 2006 emerged as the
year that Ajax moved from being an acronym to being a metaphor to all things
Service consumption-centric that enhanced the browser experience as a
first-class environment for user interaction. But even more so, 2006 saw the
emergence of real Service consumption and composition tools that aimed to
facilitate the creation of Service-oriented Business Applications (SOBAs)
and Enterprise Mashups that free the consumer-focused developer from having
to worry about the location and implementation details of the Services they
consume. Indeed, have we already reached the
<http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZAPFLASH-07212004> Web Services
Tipping Point?
Another prediction we made last year was that regulatory compliance would
take center stage in 2006. Specifically, we said that there would be a
dramatic increase in the number and capability of SOA-based compliance
solutions coming to market in 2006. Some of these solutions may be in the
form of composite applications, while others may simply be sets of Services.
Either way, SOA will become increasingly critical to many enterprise's
compliance initiatives. The result was more compliance-focused SOA
initiatives than we have fingers on our hands to count! Multi-national firms
in particular found that compliance with global regulations that continue to
change at relatively unpredictable rates has, as a result, an unpredictable
burden on their IT departments and thus they must find a way to grapple with
such external change factors.
<http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZTR-WS113> ZapThink released a
survey of SOA consulting firms in mid 2006 with the main finding that SOA
itself is a hard sell for most companies, but a focus on selling solutions
to common business problems, of which solving compliance problems is a key
one, is a cake-walk.
2007 Prediction #1: SOA Quality and Testing Market the Next Must-Have Space
So, it seems that we were right on target with our 2006 predictions. Maybe
they just were too obvious when we made them at the end of 2005. So in this
iteration, we'll try to make some predictions that are less so, or at the
very least might be up for debate. One prediction is that the new, hot area
in the SOA marketplace are testing and quality tools and solutions for SOA.
While SOA-focused testing and quality vendors have been around for at least
five years (we first covered them in our Web Services Testing report in
2002), the impetus for widespread adoption of testing across the full
Service lifecycle hasn't been there for much of that time.
However, that is set to change in a big way in 2007. Now that companies are
through with their proof-of-concept and play phases of Web Services-centric
adoption (less SOA and more ABOS), they have to grapple with the real issues
of evolving SOA: change and version management, testing in a production
environment (runtime testing), quality assurance of all SOA artifacts
including contracts, policies, schema, models, declarative composition and
process metadata, and other forms of metadata, as well as deal with
change-time and run-time governance that demands more than simply testing
the code that exposes a Web Services interface. As a result of this
heightened awareness of the real challenges in maintaining a SOA
implementation, demand for SOA quality and testing solutions will skyrocket
in 2007, leading to greater acquisitions, increased consolidation, new
venture creation, and boatloads of case studies on the topic. Watch this
space for the real action.
2007 Prediction #2: Enterprise Architect Drought
One dire prediction for 2007 is that there simply won't be enough qualified
and SOA experienced enterprise architects (EA) around. Sure, there might be
many "paper architects" - that is, those that claim EA and/or SOA skills on
their resumes or in their career history, but much of that experience will
be attendance at a few vendor-heavy SOA courses, the development of Web
Services-centric interfaces, and a sore lack of any methodology, modeling,
Service lifecycle, or governance experience to speak of. Yes, it might just
be that the biggest force gating widespread adoption of SOA is not the
technical complexity of SOA projects (one can actually say that the
technology part is relatively trivial), but rather the organizational,
architectural, and skill gap that most companies have in making this
architectural change a reality.
ZapThink has seen first-hand evidence of this lack of EA skills. First,
there is a significant demand in the marketplace for experienced SOA talent.
Second, we are seeing a burgeoning of SOA consulting companies that offer
kick-start approaches to SOA in which they supply the experienced architects
and their customers supply the heavy-lift labor to implement the Services.
Already we're starting to see a bifurcation in the IT community between
architect and developer, with development seen as an increasing commodity
whereas architecture is an increasing scarcity.
ZapThink is doing something about this lack of EA talent. In fact, we're
doing two big things about it this year. First, ZapThink launched its
<http://www.zapthink.com/lza.html> Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) program
in late 2006 with little fanfare, but we are planning to trumpet its
increasing value and successes with greater volume throughout 2007 and
beyond. While certifications do exist for aspects of SOA, they are usually
specific to a particular technology du-jour or an individual vendor
implementation. Increasingly, individuals are looking to go beyond
understanding of what SOA is and dive much deeper into how to do it right.
The demand is thus more than just training, but also the backing of a
qualified third-party organization to endorse their existing SOA skills,
enable continuous improvement, enhance networking in the community, and
enhance their current SOA-enabled careers. ZapThink is filling the unmet
need for knowledge and credentials in this area with its new LZA program.
You'll see increasing references to the LZA program throughout 2007, and you
can dive deeper into details at <http://www.zapthink.com/lza.html>
http://www.zapthink.com/lza.html.
In addition to the LZA program, ZapThink will release within the next week
or two its Architect Resource Center (ARC), a partnership with recruiting
firm Excel Partner to list qualified EA and SOA resources on the ZapThink
site to meet the needs for SOA resources. Indeed, ZapThink is now in the
position to directly help end-user firms hungry for SOA talent, through our
new ARC offering, and if our prediction comes to pass, we'll probably find
more demand for such resources than even we have the capacity to supply.
2007 Prediction #3: The SOA Suite Busts a Few Buttons. Open Source the
Remedy?
The final prediction ZapThink will stick its proverbial neck out to make for
2007 is that the SOA suites might get a bit too big in 2007. Warren Buffet
is fond of saying, "don't ask a barber if you need a haircut". What he means
to say is that vendors of a service or a product have a self-interest in
promoting the need for products that probably won't keep you away from their
sales department for long. While there's no doubt that SOA vendors are
solving real problems with products that, in many cases, actually work, the
problem is that these SOA solutions have grown from individual,
point-products that solve discrete SOA problems to gigantic SOA suites that
seem to be every bit the monolithic platform that they had been intended to
replace. In fact, we have been quoted as saying that monolithic SOA
platforms, in which you have to buy all the various parts of the solution in
order to get the true value as promised by the vendor, is at its core an
un-SOA philosophy.
The idea of SOA is to promote loose coupling and composition in an
environment of continuous change and heterogeneity. A proper architecture
should be blind to the underlying runtime infrastructure, messaging
protocol, or application server environment. Want to implement SOA on a
Commodore 64 and COBOL-based mainframe environment using CORBA over a
token-ring network? Knock your socks off - there's nothing un-SOA about
that. But saying that you need to use a single messaging bus, Service
container environment, or management infrastructure to get any value out of
SOA is being disingenuous to the SOA mindset, and a disservice to end-users
looking to finally take control of their own IT environment.
One potential antidote to the vendor indigestion that many end-user firms
are experiencing is the burgeoning of open source efforts that take a
laissez-faire approach to technology implementations. ZapThink is starting
to see increasing use of Apache and a multitude of other open source
technology underpinnings for a variety of the runtime and design-time
aspects of SOA, including Service exposure, messaging, composition, rich
client, and even security and reliability offerings. The Eclipse Foundation
has really hit a stride with regards to dominating the development landscape
for many SOA efforts. While it would be hard for us to say that such open
source efforts would crimp the businesses of the well-established software
vendors, it is clear that those efforts are not outlying or rogue efforts
proposed by small departments of large firms or by small companies. Rather,
it is precisely the behavior of many large software companies that is
encouraging or forcing the hand of large companies to seriously consider
open source Pepto-Bismol for their vendor-induced heartburn.
The ZapThink Take
In addition to the above predictions, one significant observation in 2006 is
the state of global adoption of SOA. Is the United States behind the rest of
the world with regards to SOA adoption and maturity? Probably not, but it
certainly isn't ahead. Indeed, most of the largest, advanced, and oft-quoted
examples of SOA projects in both the press and by software vendors in 2006
were in Europe, Canada, Asia, or Australia. There's so much to analyze and
understand in the trends towards global SOA adoption that we'll leave this
topic for a future ZapFlash, but rest assured this IT movement is unlike
most others with respect to adoption.
There are probably a few more predictions we could make for the year, but
we'll be brief for the sake of your reading time and also so that we have
more material for future ZapFlashes. Regardless of where you think SOA is
heading, it's clear we've crossed some sort of chasm with regards to SOA
adoption. More companies than ever are already supposing that they're going
to Service-orient their systems and businesses , and this is resulting the
growth and value of SOA throughout the world. ZapThink wishes you all a
wonderful, healthy, and rewarding 2007!
