by Joe McKendrick
January 6th, 2009 @ 9:01 am

Say it isn’t so. Or, more aptly, say it isn’t SOA…. Anne Thomas Manes says that service oriented architecture — at least in the form we’ve known it — has finally hit the wall. It hasn’t been delivering ROI, and organizations need to move on to better and faster initiatives.

She says the current economic downturn has driven a stake through the heart of a methodology that was, in her opinion, already barely clinging to life. Anne posted the following “obituary” for service oriented architecture: “SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on ’services.’”

I started this particular blog back in November of 2004, and have heard SOA declared dead over and over again through the ensuing years. (My favorite phrase — “SOA is DOA.”) Indeed, SOA has received more than its share of overblown hype, vendor over-promising and oversimplification, and market confusion. Are things any different now? Anne says companies have been fiddling with SOA for some time now, and to little or no avail. SOA “turned into a great failed experiment—at least for most organizations.

SOA was supposed to reduce costs and increase agility on a massive scale,” she explains. “Except in rare situations, SOA has failed to deliver its promised benefits. After investing millions, IT systems are no better than before. In many organizations, things are worse: costs are higher, projects take longer, and systems are more fragile than ever.”