SOA is rubbish!

There seem to be many reasons for moving into an SOA footing. Users hope to achieve lower costs, faster time to market, enhanced business agility and visibility and reduced risk. In some cases, although the technical and architectural groundwork has been laid, IT organizations have come up against roadblocks in internal procurement and investment cycles.

Reuse is a key factor in many SOA benefits. The idea is that if reusable services are created, then this is the route to removing redundancy, with a dramatic reduction in application maintenance costs. The main problems with reusing are:

• No-one knows what services have already been built
• Services don't do what everyone wants
• Programmers can be hostile to reuse

Another common complaint is that the quality of service delivered to end-users is heavily impacted by the move over to SOA. This is often a danger when replacing individually-tuned application implementations with an architected, standards-based approach.

However, in the case of SOA there are some common errors that can have far-reaching consequences for service levels, such as:

• Poorly designed SOA services
• Failure to plan for data format mapping loads
• Inadequate SOA ecosystem provision