I was sceptical about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) until last last year, in spite of this rising memegraph. I worked with IBM's proprietary technologies in the early 1990s, so I'm no easy apologist for Big Blue. But I have been impressed with their change of direction since the Dot Com crash. Websphere works. It's a solid piece of software and has been for several years. IBM maintains a fairly credible balance of "time-to-market" versus quality. They do tend to ship products prematurely, but that's the nature of the current market and their competitors behavior, and my experience has been that they make good, i.e. fix bugs, on what they release too early.
At its most strategic layer, SOA consists of three basic design patterns, each of which addresses a certain aspect of software design -
I like the simplicity of this design and I believe that it's close on the mark towards reducing total transaction costs for building and maintaining enterprise systems.
But the strongest reason to care about SOA and Business Process Modelling (BPM) is that they represent secondary s-curves of the Information Technology wave.
They address areas of software that are too fragile and cost too much to create or change. If you buy into Harry Dent's Great Boom theory, the original technology boom from 1990 to 2000 built a foundation which is a necessary component for a secondary wave of software and technology products.
Judging from the growth curves and value propositions of SOA and BPM, it seems likely to me that they are good bets for surviving the next technology shakeout, much better than staying onboard the technologies of original boom.
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I suppose I'll go to the Sushi event on Thursday.
Fair warning to D. - don't too surprised if I show up.
Posted by point of sale system on February 20, 2007 at 10:17 AM EST
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