Burton Group: SOA Is Dead

Burton Group, a research and consulting firm focused on in-depth analysis of enterprise technologies, announces the death of "SOA" (service-oriented architecture).

Once thought to be the savior of IT, SOA has instead turned into a great failed experiment -- at least for most organizations. In the beginning, the forecast for SOA was to reduce costs and increase agility on a large scale, but except in rare situations, SOA has not delivered those promised benefits. Burton Group research and surveys have uncovered that for many organizations, their SOA efforts have made things worse, not better: costs are higher, projects take longer, and systems are more fragile than ever. Now with budgets tightening in 2009, organizations are cutting the funding for their SOA initiatives.

According to a blog post by Anne Thomas Manes, VP and research director, "It's time to accept reality. SOA fatigue has turned into SOA disillusionment. Business people no longer believe that SOA will deliver spectacular benefits. 'SOA' has become a bad word. It must be removed from our vocabulary."

Although the word "SOA" is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever. Service-orientation is a prerequisite for rapid integration of data and business processes; it enables situational development models, such as mashups; and it's the foundational architecture for SaaS and cloud computing. (Imagine shifting aspects of your application portfolio to the cloud without enabling integration between on-premise and off-premise applications.)

Commenting on her blog post, Manes said, "The term 'SOA' has lost its luster. Rather than talking about 'SOA,' we now need to talk about 'services.' Stop debating about insignificant technology issues. Instead focus on building the right services that support business requirements."

About Burton Group

Burton Group (www.burtongroup.com) is an IT research and advisory services firm that helps technologists make smart enterprise architecture decisions. Burton Group provides in-depth, IT research and advisory services to executives and technologists at Global 2000 organizations. Focused on strategic business technologies and the unique needs of enterprise organizations, Burton Group provides clients company-wide access to its world-renowned analysts and a suite of powerful, intuitive research and decision support tools unmatched in the industry.