In the blog entry on SOA Lessons: The end of the hype cycle? Revisiting 2007, Judith Hurwitz is talking about end of the hype and beginning of the reality for SOA.
There are mistakes mentioned:
My main observation about 2007 was that it was a year of learning about SOA. It was also a year when people made lots of mistakes including:
1. Let’s code thousands of cool web services and see what happens — guess what…no one knew what to do with them!
2. Let’s create a corporate wide SOA implementation this year — what’s wrong with boiling the ocean? (too obvious to make a comment on this one)
3. If we implement an Enterprise Service Bus we are all done with SOA…right? — wrong!
4. Hey, we are reusing a service in the same application but we’re not getting very much value….(try reusing in a different application)
And there are successes mentioned:
I saw many big successes with SOA in 2007. Many companies are understanding that SOA is, in fact, a business strategy based on codifying business services that represent best practices for business policy and process. These companies are taking a long view — not expecting instant results. Many of these organizations are finding strong returns on investments but they would rather not tip off the competition. Before starting one SOA project, our team had to sign three different non-disclosure documents!
And the part I like the most, the predictions:
I think that we are at the end of the over hyped stage of the SOA market. It is inevitable in any new market that it begins with unreasonable expectations. When customers start using the approach to solve real problems, it is always harder than the hype would suggest. The reality is that transforming software from purpose driven, single use applications to flexible, agile, and reusable services that are loosely coupled is hard work. In fact, the fact that we are getting over the hype phase actually means that SOA is real!