SOA: How New in 2008

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been increasingly adopted during the past five years, with its promised benefits validated by early adopters. One of the clearest lessons learned is that SOA is all about finding a better approach -- rather than a better technology -- for enterprise application development. In 2008, we will see a critical emphasis on establishing a new IT culture in which SOA-based projects have a better chance of success.

The biggest influences on SOA projects during 2008 are likely to come from:

• Enterprises addressing cultural changes related to SOA adoption.
• New tools aimed at supporting SOA-based designs, architectures and especially deployments will begin to emerge.

Trends for SOA in 2008 will be influenced by a combination of cultural and technological issues.

• Cultural Issues: Let's deal first with the changes related to IT cultural issues. It's often said that SOA is an approach, not a technology. As the number of enterprises with successful SOA-based projects continues to grow in 2008, pressure on IT professionals to investigate SOA as a potentially better way to align IT spending with the bottom line will increase. In other words, adoption rates for SOA are very likely to continue to rise, pushing related cultural issues to the forefront.

• Trends in Technology: In 2008, we will see the continuing commoditization of software and hardware, and will begin to feel its impact on SOA-based systems through new innovations. Operating systems, application servers, database management systems, Web servers and Web services are commoditizing, but so are data centers and computing clouds built on top of them, such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Salesforce.com's Force.com cloud computing architecture. Also, a growing number of SOA deployments will start to adopt open source, such as messaging and service enablement SOA products, and investigate one or more of the cloud-based services available -- whether for testing or production use. It also seems likely that SOA deployments will start to adopt some of the newer products based on the large Web site scale out techniques to increase performance, scalability and reliability.

• Deployment Choices: The trend toward virtualization seems to be hitting warp speed this year, with everyone from VMware to Microsoft to Red Hat and many others getting into the game. In 2008, virtual machines will become an accepted part of everyday SOA deployments. The emergence of multicore chip architectures is going to push people even faster toward virtualization and grid-based deployment solutions to make the most efficient use of hardware and network resources. However, management and operational tool support is lacking, especially for provisioning, monitoring and maintaining services in the new virtualized and grid-enabled infrastructures. This is something else that will begin to be addressed in 2008.

So this is how SOA will change in 2008 and you must be equipped to adapt to these changes. Does this helped you in any way, do make me know.