SOA Is Not About Business

Sam Gentile comments about my attempts to define SOA (Part I, Part II, and more to come) by saying that:

That's all well and true, but any definition of SOA must encompass the business drivers and business reasons, as SOA is not really about technology. It is about a better alignment of business and IT through business processes and services. The goal is to create a dynamic, more Agile and Dynamic IT that can respond quickly to new business opportunities and threats by quickly assembling new capabilities from putting together composite applications (and even Mash-ups) from reusable business services...

Sorry Sam, but I beg to differ, not about the importance of business drive behind implementing SOA, but about what SOA is. The culprit, in my opinion, is terminology overloading.

SOA is, as I said in the above mentioned post and numerous other times, first and foremost an architectural style -- and as an architectural style it offers several architectural benefits and poses several architectural constraints. This has nothing to do with business drivers. It has to do with defining components, relations, attributes on relations and components as well as constraints. Now you can take those set of rules and use (or misuse) them as you like, in the context of a subsystem, single project, product line, or enterprise -- this is your choice.

Applying SOA, on the other hand, has everything to do with the business. I'll take Sam's post word-for-word but instead of using the word SOA, I would prefer using the term SOA initiative. An SOA initiative is the effort of applying SOA in a wide context for an enterprise, aiming to increase the alignment of IT and the business, etc. I would have to say though, that in my experience, such an effort would rarely use SOA alone. It would also include other distributed architectural styles that also help with decoupling and loose coupling like EDA and REST to name a couple.

By the way, SOA has nothing to do with technology either. You can implement SOA using WS-*, Atompub, MSMQ, CORBA just as much as you can implement REST with quite a few technologies. It so happens that WS-* is a common implementation technology for SOA, and that HTTP is used as a common implementation technology for REST but both styles live independently of the technologies.

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 05:53 PM  Permalink