SOA stands for "Same Old Architecture"

Last week I went for an IDC conference on "Service Oriented Architecture" (SOA). I went there hoping that the conference speakers will help provide a clearer perspective on why SOA is going to change the world.

The key note got off to a real bad start with one of the analysts presenting pretty much throwing all buzzwords, jargons and cliches in one 15min talk. There were a number of references to Geoffery Moore and his concepts to a predominantly tech audience who probably have never heard of him. It only got worse as the day progressed.

Vendors, both product and services firms, tried their best to convince everyone that their tool/ approach will offer the best. They took great pains to convince that SOA is not web services yet the only example of SOA that was demonstrated was a email validation service using web services. The services vendors talked a great deal about SOA governance but had a hard time talking about how it was different from IT Governance and where it fit in. There were a number of times when different speakers had radically different thoughts on what a term meant. A guy from the services side of a tools vendor said SOA Governance is like IT Governance but at an enterprise level while a CIO of an utility company said SOA Governance is about security and service life cycle management.

I am appalled by the number of snake oil salesmen in the IT industry. No wonder IT credibility is really low. We have a poor track record, poor communication skills but we feel the need to come up with some new term every three years and try to sell it to the world as the new silver bullet. Why can't we call it as we see it? I called SOA "old wine in a new bottle". But, a colleague of mine said it better - "old underwear in new packaging." The SOA story is just one example. The other one is SOX (Sarbanes Oxley bogey). There are a whole lot of products and vendors offering solutions for SOX compliance. SOX does not directly mention IT anywhere but that has not stopped vendors from proposing incredibly stupid solutions. I once had a consultant from a large service provider suggest that we should run SSL on our LAN for SOX compliance.

There were one or two speakers at this conference who made sense. There was this guy from HP who started off by saying "I was doing SOA twnety years back." His point was SOA is nothing but doing IT architecture right - to support the business functions. The new technologies and standards just make things easier.

Revolution in IT will happen when IT personnel and technology vendors understand the business and its problems.