Yesterday Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group gave a “SOA Wake” talk at the Burton Group Catalyst 09 show - explaining what she meant by her now-famous blog post ‘SOA Is dead: long live services” As usual, good straight talk from Anne.
Her point with the original post: SOA got sold as a thing in itself, when really it was just set of principles to free up IT to be more responsive to deliver something of value to the business. Go back to the definition – it’s just a service architecture – a means to an end.
The part of the talk I liked: Technology people love to talk about the means, not the end – or as Anne said – “Don’t sell architecture to business people.. that is what gets you into trouble.”
Sometimes we make the same mistake talking about cloud computing. Lots of focus on the ‘how it works’ but do the business people really care if it’s public, private, open source, built on microsoft, force or run by hamsters spinning in a cage?
A recession isn’t good for anybody – but maybe it forces us to think of cloud computing in cold hard business terms – how are you going to survive by either finding new ways to make money (sell your old data or new services via APIs) or blow away your existing cost structure? There are business people putting pressure on the cloud computing vendors to talk in these terms – not about architecture.
