What SOA means for management

Some new technologies may allow for management to follow deployment, but not service-oriented architecture.

The success of SOA within any organization depends on the appropriate management, according to industry watchers who say SOA will change the traditional management paradigm and require vendors and IT managers to update their approaches. For instance, the loosely coupled nature of SOA services will demand updated technology -- tools that can follow the application components from system to system without being tied to one physical server.

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"One of the core challenges . . . is loose coupling, where you want to build services that you can control and manage independently of the consumers of those services," said Jason Bloomberg, managing partner and senior analyst at ZapThink during a live discussion sponsored by Tidal Software. "Management then becomes the critical enabler for loose coupling, which is the critical enabler for business agility. That is how it all fits together." (For a Webcast of the discussion, click here.)

Yet it's not that simple. IT managers need to have begun breaking down the walls, or silos, between IT domains to enable management of loosely coupled application services across a business environment, said Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

"SOA management needs to go a step further and take into consideration many systems and interdependencies -- perhaps involving services coming from outside the organizational boundaries, be they from partners across the supply chain, and even hosting and commercial service providers," Gardner said. "Management is going to be, as a topic, very important to SOA in a traditional sense, but also management in a new sense."