Nearly two years after proclaiming that SOA was dead, the Burton group has changed their mind and now writes that SOA is set for a comeback.
Quoting Chris Howard from Burton, Maxwell Cooter writes :
... there's a different climate now. There are several reasons for [SOA] comeback... there is a still a need for SOA but it had been sidelined as a technical issue and that IT had failed to sell SOA as a transforming methodology... SOA projects failed because there was too much concentration on the technology and because, in the financial climate of the past few years, major transformational projects were canned
According to Cooter:
... [the] companies would need to stop talking about SOA as a technology but in terms of a business case. Technologists must recast SOA as an architectural approach rather than a technology-first solution... Service oriented environments require a higher level of abstraction in design, which must be decoupled from the underlying technology
Picking on Burton’s report, David Linthicum notes that the initial SOA failure was, for the most part, due to the overselling the SOA technology (ESBs as "SOA-in-a-Box,") not to the approach itself. In his opinion, SOA is a foundation of many things including good enterprise architecture, business/IT alignment, effective usage of cloud computing and more.
According to Linthicum:
The core purpose of SOA is to define a way of doing something that provides an end-state architecture that's much more changeable and thus much more agile, and ultimately provides more value to the business.
For a few years now InfoQ has been promoting SOA as an architectural style based on a functional decomposition of enterprise business architecture and introduces two high-level abstractions: enterprise business services and business processes. Enterprise business services represent existing IT capabilities (aligned with the business functions of the enterprise). Business processes, which orchestrate business services, define the overall functioning of the business. This architectural style is a foundation of many current and future implementations regardless of the technologies that are used for the actual implementation. It is nice that analysts are sharing our opinion again.