“Is SOA dead?” This question arose on the SOA Forum last year organized by the Working Group SOA Technologies of BITKOM, the Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media in Germany. During the previous 12 months, the working group of BITKOM evaluated the current situation trying to find an answer to this question. Last week their conclusions were presented at the SOA Forum 2010 in Bad Homburg to interested people like journalist, BITKOM members, SOA users, vendors and researchers. I participated in that meeting and want to give you an overview of the discussions.
In her keynote, Prof. Dr. Christine Legner, European Business School, presented the results of a study about the current implementation status of different SOA projects in the German speaking area. More than 60 IT-managers reviewed their approach, the costs and benefits. The study showed that the projects following an integrated approach with business orientation, Enterprise Service Repository and Governance can expect the best ROI.
During the day, different SOA practitioners shared their experience. It was quite interesting for me to see the real range of SOA in practice. From migration of legacy systems up to model driven service implementation different aspects were pointed out. All participants agreed that there is no typical SOA effort, but that every SOA effort is an ongoing process starting with a first step and changing in the long term your day-to-day business.
After the lunch break two guys from Opitz Consulting kept the audience awake with an exceptional presentation about SOA antipatterns, packaged in a fabulous story about the SOA pixy teaching the CEO king the DOs and DON'Ts of a SOA project.
But where is SOA heading to? An outlook was given by some researchers. They see the future e.g. in combining SOA with business rules technology and complex event processing.
The presentations are open for public at a site run by BITKOM. Sorry, as it is a German association most of the information is only available in German.
For me personally the conference had its special highlight: for the first time the new SOA compendium was distributed. This initiative was also started during the last year to evaluate the potential of SOA and give some guidance to the users. My colleague Uwe Roediger and I invested a lot of work to demonstrate the relationship between BPM and SOA. Our conclusion is that to get the full power of BPM, you need SOA as an enabler. To learn more about this have a look in the compendium.