<<It's hard to believe that another year has come and gone, but with so
much happening in 2008: global recession and economic stress,
presidential elections, warfare and terrorism, natural disasters, and
other happenings both good and bad, perhaps it's good to shut the door
quickly on this year and open up a new, more hopeful one. After all, it
is at times of strife that sometimes the greatest successes emerge. And
this is what we are hoping for in 2009: not just for the world at large,
but for companies that adopt and implement the tenets of
service-oriented architecture (SOA).
In this ZapFlash, as is our usual practice, we'll take a look at some of
the predictions we made for this year and see how they panned out, and
make some new ones. We'll scold ourselves for predictions that missed
the mark, and of course, give ourselves kudos for the ones that were
spot on. This time, however, we'd like to wax more realistic with our
2009 projections. No doubt this year will be a difficult one for most
companies throughout the world, and as such, we'd like to be as
realistic and helpful as we can with our projections.
*2008: How did we do?*
In our 2008 SOA Forecast
<http://www.zapthink.com/report.html?id=ZAPFLASH-200812>, we already
acknowledged that the economy was entering a slowdown. While the news
media finally picked up on it by mid-year, already in January 2008, we
stated that the economy downturn would have significant impact on IT
purse strings. That being said, we did not see that there would be a
universal pattern of cancelations or postponements of SOA initiatives,
but rather the emergence of two groups: those who did not understand or
justify a business case for SOA and therefore would be required to
rethink those efforts, and those who already experienced economic
benefits and therefore would accelerate them in the economic downturn.
To a certain extent, we are seeing this very behavior. In fact, there
has been significant discussion in the media and blogosphere about the
dichotomy between those firms accelerating their SOA efforts and those
that are shelving them. Most likely, we will continue to see that same
behavior throughout 2009. Plus one point for ZapThink.
Our second prediction was that the concept of the Enterprise Mashup
would come into its own and potentially even usurp the visibility of
SOA. As we stated, "SOA will fade from view as an increasing number of
organizations focus on enterprise mashups as the mechanism for business
empowerment in the enterprise." While there was heightened interest in
enterprise mashups in 2008, I think we can fairly say we missed the mark
on this one. A number of companies put most (if not all) their chips
into the mashup market category, and when the market failed to develop
as we prognosticated, they floundered. ZapThink clearly believes there
is merit in the enterprise mashup concept, but perhaps its time has not
yet come. Companies are still struggling with the basics of business
survival and therefore the concepts of business agility and empowerment
exist only second to basic survival. Minus one point for ZapThink.
Our third and final prediction for 2008 was that there would be
continued consolidation in the SOA space culminating in an acquisition
of ZapThink itself. While there was no doubt significant consolidation
in the space (the SOA platform vendors get increasingly bigger and more
monolithic), our prediction about ZapThink missed the mark. Well,
perhaps the prediction wasn't a complete miss as we did receive, and
reject, two offers for ZapThink that didn't meet our requirements. Yet,
this is good news for all you readers as those offers would have
required us to rethink our strategy and business model, and perhaps
provide less value to you, our valued customers. So, no points added or
deducted for this prediction. Final score: just like the Detroit Lions,
a zero for the year.
*2009: A year of modest gains*
Let's hope we can do better for our 2009 predictions. Our predictions
will be modest, yet we'll still try to stick our neck out a bit to make
the predictions debate-worthy. The first big prediction is that we will
see at least one notable and well-publicized SOA failure and one notable
and well-publicized SOA success. So that we can accurately determine if
we successfully called this prediction at this time next year, let's
define our terms. By "notable and well-publicized", we mean that the
company in question will be featured in at least one major IT industry
trade magazine and perhaps even a major international news daily. The
success or failure will have significant business impact specifically
attributable to the organization's adoption of SOA. On the success side,
it might mean specific revenue, product release, merger and acquisition
opportunity, or reduced liability directly attributable to a particular
SOA project. On the failure side, it would mean a large investment in
SOA, whose "failure" (as determined by the company in question) resulted
in loss of revenue, market share, opportunity, compliance, or other
negative impact. Either way, we will acknowledge that by this time next
year, there will be at least one undisputed success and one undisputed
failure due to SOA.
If our business is any indication, we believe that SOA education and
training will be in significant demand throughout 2009. In particular,
we believe that there will be tens of millions of dollars spent
worldwide educating enterprise architects, IT practitioners, project
managers, and line of business in proper usage and application of SOA.
SOA training revenues and opportunities will greatly increase the size
of consulting and service firms and even result in the doubling of the
size of ZapThink.
Prediction #3: Cloud, cloud, cloud. We have already started to hear more
about cloud computing and anything cloud-related as the year drew to a
close. We expect the din of the cloud-related chatter to turn into a
real roar by this time next year. Everything SOA-related will probably
be turned into something cloud-related by all the big vendors, and
companies will desperately try to turn their SOA initiatives into cloud
initiatives. Time will tell if this emphasis on cloud computing is a
good thing for the future of SOA and IT, but we are hopeful that some of
the themes that are emerging in cloud computing will borrow heavily from
what was learned about SOA, and Service-oriented cloud computing
initiatives become the rule in 2009, rather than the exception.
To put a bit more meat on the bone, we believe that the term "cloud"
itself will be better defined and understood throughout 2009. Our
perspective is that cloud computing infers location and platform
neutrality, the emergence of virtualization as applied to applications
and process, and a distributed, virtualized approach to
Software-as-a-Service. In order to realize these goals, cloud computing
requires key SOA best practices, as to do cloud computing right,
organizations need to build Business Services that abstract the cloud
resources. Given that the goal of SOA is loosely-coupled,
platform-agnostic, flexible capabilities in the face of continuous
change, one could say that cloud computing architectures need to be
inherently Service-oriented. The irony is that while SOA might be
required to do cloud computing right, people might not know they're
"doing SOA" when they do cloud computing, but it doesn't matter. After
all, we don't believe that SOA needs to be visible to be useful... it
just needs to be used.
*The ZapThink take*
This whole ZapFlash has been ZapThink's take. We'd like to hear your
take. One of the biggest changes you'll see from ZapThink in 2009 is a
completely new website with an emphasis on SOA education and training,
advisory, and a growing repository of SOA artifacts and documents. It
will also be a lot more interactive with you, our over 34,000 readers of
the ZapFlash and subscribers to our research and advisory. Our Licensed
ZapThink Architect (LZA) community now stands at almost 700 credentialed
architects, and you'll see us providing even greater value to that
community as we promote this army of well-educated and qualified SOA
architects. But more importantly, the growth and success of the SOA
market depends on you. We have been honored to be part of the market's
understanding of SOA since our inception in 2000, and we hope to
continue to be valuable to you in 2009. And that is our real prediction
for the year ahead.>>
You can read this at:
http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid26_gci1343810,00.html
Gervas
