Friday, January 09, 2009

Services Wake - A New Label for SOA?

Maybe the label "SOA" has gone for a Burton, but the concepts and principles of service-orientation remain important. There has been some good discussion on the CBDI Forum Linked-In group, prompted by the SOA obituary by Anne Thomas Manes.

If SOA is dead, long live services. Services (like the hero of the Irish song Finnigan's Wake) are not dead, they are only sleeping, and need to be woken up.

So do we need a new label? Some commentators have indicated that they would be happy to see the end of all such labels, but some have suggested a few alternatives.

  • BaaS - Business as a Service
  • CaaS - Capability as a Service
  • CBDI - Capability-Based Dynamic Intelligence
  • ELVIS - Enterprise Layered Virtual Information Services
  • TAFKAS - The Architecture Formerly Known as SOA
  • VICO - Virtualized IT Capability Orchestration

I particularly like the last of these. (Perhaps some of my readers will guess why.) But I guess the CaaS label is the most likely to fly.

1 comment:

  1. I just blogged that I think “Big SOA is Dead; Little SOA is Thriving” at: http://tinyurl.com/soa-today2 . Ok, maybe Big SOA isn’t “dead”, but certainly struggling to convince companies to invest in BPM, BAM, ESB (Big SOA) in today’s economic climate is a tough, academic sell when they can go Little SOA with positive ROI. Organizations want rapid results– they want SOA Today and not 6-9 months down the line!

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