Software's Top 10 2005 Trends: #4 Service Oriented Architectures

Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are all the rage these days.  Almost every software vendor is putting out some kind of SOA-related marketing spin and trade magazines buzz with the pros and cons of various approaches to building and deploying SOAs.

Despite all the talk, very few companies have actually built and deployed a robust SOA yet.  That’s because building an SOA requires not just the creation numerous new web services interfaces but often requires significant re-architecting of existing systems.

2005 should see some serious progress on the SOA front though.   Over the past two years, many companies have successfully laid the foundation for SOAs by building out a small portfolio of independent web services.  With this foundation in place, constructing a full fledged SOA is not only possible now, but increasingly necessary as companies seek a cohesive way to manage their web services portfolios.

While SOAs have been cast as a sort of high-level application integration panacea, they will create some serious problems of their own in areas such as performance, security, and manageability.  While a new class of SOA management platforms from companies such as Blue Titan, Amberpoint, and SOA Software have sprung up to meet these challenges, there’s a strong argument that such SOA management capabilities should be built directly into the application server platforms which already have many robust low level management capabilities.  In addition to the app server players other folks, such as the directory management and network players players are also staking a claim to space as evidenced by Oblix's recent acquisition of Confluent, CA's acquisition of Adjoin, and HP's acquisition of Talking Blocks.  Which group ultimately comes out of top will be one of the more interesting stories to watch in the SOA space.

For a complete list of Software's Top 10 2005 trends click here.