SOA Consortium Insights

Looking Forward to 2008

As 2007 comes to a close, we look back on an amazingly successful launch year for the SOA Consortium.  From the 11 founding members in late January, only eleven months later membership is over 80, with the strong support of our five Sponsors (BEA, CISCO, IBM, SAP and Sparx Systems).  We're clearly seeing the convergence of a perfect storm: business agility, service orientation and business process management.  Frankly, it's about time.

In less than a year, the Consortium has delivered terrific podcasts on the move to SOA (several more were recorded last week, and will appear in January); a vision of enterprise architecture in 2010 that supports the move to service orientation; a remarkable string of feedback from SOA thought leaders from our Executive Summits; and an amazing array of case studies outlining what works and why we seek to move to SOA.  The business need for agility drives that transition.

So we have a lot to be thankful for.  So in this season of transitions, all of us here at the SOA Consortium hope you enjoyed a happy Diwali, Hannukkah or Eid or are looking forward to a Merry Christmas.  And we wish you a happy and peaceful New Year of 2008, and a successful transition to Service Oriented Architecture!  Thank you for your support!

SOA: Many things

Burc Oral has a good post on the 'SOA Beast' on the Strategic Use of Information Technology blog.  Using the backdrop of the blind men and an elephant, Burc discusses the different perspectives of SOA and services, provides insights on SOA and service lifecycles, reminds us "that SOA is more than a buzzword. It is the way for organizations to rapidly develop capabilities, to collaborate and meet the expectations of their stakeholders. SOA’s agility makes it an enterprise business strategy" and cautions us "SOA may also be DOA, dead on arrival, if we narrowly assume that it is just a bunch of web services, a product or a panacea for integration nightmares."

Read his full post here.