A recent survey suggests that two thirds of large organisations are looking to implement a service catalogue in the next few months.  However, the same survey also stated that less than half could articulate what benefit the service catalogue would be to the business.  Looks like we are in a classic technology hype cycle!

One of the realities of SOA is that even in the most enthusiastic organisations not all services can or will be delivered by discrete services written in .NET or Java. For historical or pragmatic reasons, some of the functionality is likely to be delivered by business applications. These may be legacy systems that have been bought or developed pre-SOA. In many cases new applications have been brought in post-SOA, much to the architects’ dismay.

With the current hard times continuing to challenge IT budgets, I fear that all the good effort that is going into SOA currently could be squandered by ill-conceived or rushed outsourcing of the wrong services and wrong responsibilities at the wrong time to the few remaining IT service companies.

It is worth pointing out that the analyst community have consistently promoted SOA and outsourcing as being good bedfellows. There are two main models here:

For those organisations that have moved into live running of business applications based on SOA, one of the (many) current headaches is monitoring and managing end to end transactions. Although application, network and infrastructure monitoring tools have been around for many years, the loosely coupled nature of SOA presents some challenges in providing the transaction visibility, integrity and recovery capability that mainframe users have enjoyed since the 1970s.

For those of us who have been developing applications for many years (think COBOL & Assembler from the 70s and 80s), the idea of having a code library (programs and routines) is nothing new. However for the Web Services generation, this concept has taken a while to re-emerge, but has now been packaged in the form of a services registry and/or repository.

About 15 years ago I came across ‘The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook’ by Jay Conrad Levinson. The concept was to create branding and lead generation through unconventional and small scale activities and events that could have as much impact as a large seven figure advertising campaign. Unfortunately, a lot of people took this as an excuse to commission irritating and humourless “viral” internet campaigns churned out by clueless marketing agencies. However, the concept of getting maximum results from minimum resources has stuck with me.

Cloud Computing is an emerging style of IT delivery in which applications, data, and IT resources are rapidly provisioned and provided as standardised offerings to users over the web in a flexible pricing model.

At a recent conference where I presented on the current state of Cloud Computing, I was pleasantly surprised at the level of genuine interest given the current low investment situation in which most companies find themselves.

The SOA bandwagon has been trundling on for about ten years now and, if you believe Gartner (and why not?) SOA has passed the Peak of Inflated Expectations, dived to the Trough of Disillusionment, and is currently climbing the Slope of Enlightenment, on its way to the Plateau of Productivity. Industry estimates are that the journey for most companies is at least another 3 – 5 years. There are a small number of published success stories for SOA, and I am sure a large of unpublished horror stories.