August 21, 2007
SOA and the FT Tech Hype Index
There’s a natural cycle in the corporate tech business. Suppliers come up with the latest Big Idea. PR departments promote the heck out of it. Tech journalists, always on the lookout for some shiny new thing, rush to write about it. Sometimes, customers even buy it. Within a couple of years the spotlight moves on to the next Big Idea - and noone stops to ask too much about the ideas that flopped.
"Service-oriented architecture" has been climbing this hype curve for some time. Yet the platforms on which SOA are meant to be built - such as those from Oracle and SAP - are still years from completion. Early adoption rates are very low. This may end up being the new architecture of the software business, but somehow these things have a way of mutating. Few customers bet big on a whole new architecture. In time, the idea is revised and adapted, a new label is found. The PR departments come up with a different slogan.
A good mark of the hype is the number of mentions that a new technology gets in the media. The chart below shows a 12-month count of the press mentions of SOA (from the Factiva database of media sources.) For a comparison, look at what happened to another Big Idea that fizzled - utility computing. Turns out companies weren’t really ready for that one after all.
I’m not sure how the chart supports the argument that SOA may fizzle like utility computing has.
SOA has much more traction in the press, according to the article. So how can one imply anything concerning SOA from the utility computing trend?
I think that the first two paragraphs stand on their own, and paragraph 3 (plus the chart) only add a confusing end note.
Posted by: Stephen Cloughley | August 28th, 2007 at 6:01 pm | Report this commentThe IT industry frightens people away from investing in important and emerging areas by continually insisting on creating three letter acronyms (TLAs!) and over-hyping many advances unnecessarily. As a business applications vendor, in our experience big technology vendors use such hype to cover the fact that it takes them years to implement new technology like this into their older architectures. ERP vendors particularly are slow to embrace technology like this as integrating with other applications is not necessarily part of their strategy – they want you to buy all your applications from them.
More specialist (‘best of class’) software companies (like CODA) rely on our ability to integrate with any other system, because it allows us to focus on in-depth support for accounting. Hence we have embraced technology like SOA. Our customers are already using it extensively to integrate using web services with their other business applications.
So no, companies aren’t ready for ‘SOA’, because our industry is polluting great technologies with hype and marketing terms. But they should be ready to embrace the underlying web services technology which allows applications to communicate with each other effortlessly, improving data flow and ensuring that an organisation has a single view of its business.
Posted by: David Turner | August 29th, 2007 at 5:54 am | Report this comment