Truth in SOA

I was at SOAWorld 2008 yesterday and had the pleasure of hearing David Linthicum's keynote presentation entitled "SOA by the Numbers".

One of the powerful messages he made was that the era of "management by magazine" is over and the fact that there are less SOA projects starting implies not that SOA adoption is waning, but that more projects are in-flight. This will inevitably lead to a scaling problem as SOA scales from micro-domains (also called the "little-bus") to macro-domains (also called the "big-bus") where the benefits of SOA are amplified for the business. Currently, other than Intel and and few other players, most vendors have been focused on the micro-domain with the proliferation of ESBs.

While I agreed for the most part with David's point about having a true services strategy and the right people for the job, these are truisms - the fact remains that SOA is steeped in technology right now. The line-of-business doesn't care so much about implementing SOA for its own sake, they are thinking in business terms where SOA is of instrumental or utilitarian value - a means to compete and not an end in itself; I think this is part of the adoption challenge as SOA is driven internally at the micro-domain level by software architects and engineers.