SOA is not dead, shoots back annoyed CA

Computer Associates has dismissed analyst claims that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is dead, and has released a survey that highlights the rising number of SOA deployments to backup its position.

R.I.P., SOA

Earlier this month analyst house Burton Group said that the word SOA was 'dead.' "SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession," blogged Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton.

To be fair, she did say however there was going to be a growing interest in services-based IT. "SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS cloud computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on 'services,'" Manes wrote at the time.

Instead of becoming a saviour, SOA "instead turned into a great failed experiment - at least for most organisations," Manes said. "SOA failed to deliver on promised benefits and after the investment of millions, IT systems are not better than before. In some cases they are worse, with costs higher and projects taking longer," she said.

But Computer Associates doesn't see things like that. "I quite disagree with their position," said Prabhjot Singh, vice president of marketing for CA's Application Performance Management business unit. "Economics are affecting every technology within IT, not just SOA, so the idea the economy is affecting only SOA is incorrect."

"To say that SOA is dead is a misnomer," he insisted. "SOA is more a frame of mind, a way of solving business challenges today, it is not necessarily a set of technology pieces. You need a mindset of solving these problems in a different way."

"That said, SOA has certainly not been the silver bullet that everyone thought it would be," he told Techworld. "But we are seeing more and more customers transforming from legacy to SOA systems, and we are able to assist by providing visibility of the end-user experience and marrying that with the performance and services of back-end systems, so one is able to justify ROI and know what the user experience is."

He pointed to a recently released survey on SOA deployments which found that the number of SOA deployments are rising, but that mission-critical SOA applications are in need of better reliability.

The CA sponsored survey targeted businesses in the US, UK, France, Germany, and Australia that had either already deployed or are planning to deploy SOA based applications. A total of 615 participated in the survey, which took place in July and August of last year.

It found that for many organisations, SOA is playing an increasingly important role in IT infrastructure and in the deployment of web?based services. 73 percent said they have deployed an SOA application, whereas 23 percent said they were planning a SOA deployment. Uptake is highest in the US, closely followed by Germany and Australia, with the UK and France bringing up the rear.

"SOA has been a buzzword for quite some time now," said Singh. "But the survey suggests it is here and it has arrived. It is in the early release stages, but we expect broader adoption this year."