SOA: Architecture, Governance, Standards, and Technologies 2011

There has been a lot of talk about unsuccessful SOA projects during
the last couple of years. Some analysts have gone as far as pronouncing
SOA dead. The truth is there is nothing wrong with SOA, but it has often
been the victim of “identity theft”: Web Services technologies and
Middleware products pretend to be the architectural blueprint for your
SOA. However, SOA’s true identity lies in the Best Practices for Service
Orientation, a well defined architecture blueprint, and Service
Oriented development processes that we can rely on to achieve
predictable results.

Many companies have embraced a SOA approach for development and
integration projects. Now they are embarking on the next phase – a more
systematic adoption of Service-Oriented practices. However, simply
buying into Middleware technologies like Enterprise Service Bus and the
latest generation of development tools is not sufficient for successful
implementation of an Enterprise SOA. It is time to expand our view on
SOA: how can we assess the maturity level of our organization and define
a roadmap for future projects? How do we navigate the increasing number
of standards and overlapping product offerings? Governance and security
have to be our top priorities, and we need to prepare our service based
applications to run in a Cloud without requiring costly modifications.