VOSibilities

Have you ever bought a consumer electronic device, gotten it home and then decided that the purchase was a big, big mistake because the remote control was nothing but unrelated, unlabeled buttons that were not lighted for visibility in a dark room?

Well, after five or six years of singing the “SOA is piece parts” jingle and installing buttons without labels or lights, enterprise architects, consultants and the industry in general are discovering that business users, specifically application developers in line of business development teams, can’t do anything useful with “SOA.” No surprise there, though the purists blame “culture” or “people and process failures” or, my favorite, the “inability to sell the benefits of SOA inside the organization.”

Face it, SOA has been a juggernaut for enterprise software companies eager to prey upon large companies’ insatiable need for flexibility in order to sell them (parts of) the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s one of the oldest scams in the world: pretty your pig with the currently popular scent. This is how even CAD systems — about as far from SOA as you can imagine — got the SOA label.

Now, we’re beginning to see more and more of the kind of teeth-gnashing reappraisal that accompanies dire predictions of the “failure” of SOA. And, not coincidentally, the desire to find the next big thing: AJAX is hot, so why not WOA?

All of this angst about SOA is clearly prelude to the mass adoption of SOA. Once SOA moves from concept and process to actual developer-oriented product — just as the web went from HTTP (the standard that embodies a concept) to browsers (a product developers can develop for) — mass adoption is inevitable.

Consider this comment from Chris Howard of the Burton Group at Interop, as reported by Network World’s Jon Brodkin:

…very often, IT departments implement a SOA program that may be technically proficient but doesn’t meet the needs of business users…

Hear, hear. Howard also talks of “fatigue” setting in. Of course people will tire of essentially abstract and useless toys as the realities of needing to succeed in business overwhelm the desire to play all day.

Let me give you another indication of SOA-as-piece-parts fatigue: we’ve cancelled our pay-per-click campaigns on SOA search terms on the major search engines. The words are expensive, thanks to the enterprise software companies that hope to sell more unintelligible remote controls, and the clicks we received weren’t people looking for solutions — just more architecture.

Instead, we hit a nerve when we started talking to Java developers about how to create service orchestrations with a visual orchestration system. We’ve had 200 people attend and nearly 400 people watch a replay of a webinar showing Java developers how to succeed in actually creating something and deploying it as opposed to training them how to sew together some Rube Goldberg application architecture.

However self-serving it seems, I am confident that we at Active Endpoints are on exactly the correct product track, one that will bring SOA to fruition: actual tooling, digestible by mere mortals, that makes creating true SOA-based applications both easy and fun.

We are all about adding lights and intelligible labels to the remote control.

David Worthington of SD Times covers the release of ActiveVOS 5.0 and writes that we have “…cracked the code to bring Web services into mass deployment for line of business applications.” The entire article is here.