I recently read an article in Information Week that SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) “needs business transformation”. To tell you the truth I was completely stumped. All the while I thought that SOA was to enable business and not the other way around.

I may be wrong. But here’s my take on it anyway.

SOA is common sense.

Its not web services, its not SOAP. Its not REST, and it certainly is not a vendor product or platform. If you have been led to believe that SOA needs investment of time and money (tons of it), needs management buy in and support and needs a re-evalutation of business practices, you have been made a monkey of. Its time you snap out of it if you want to do your business any good.

SOA is just that – Service Oriented Architecture, where you intelligently design and decouple your software components so they perform a single or a set of related functions. It can be as simple as a function call within a program, a set of mainframe programs thrown together, an invocation over the web or a message passed over a messaging system.

In fact, most SOA programs don’t actually lead to a Service Oriented Architecture. As soon as you invest in a million dollar budget to develop an SOA based architecture, consider it DOA. Because SOA is how you plan and develop what’s going on and what’s needed. Its not something your just build one time and take an exam on.

As per information week, 90% of all SOA programs have not yielded benefits yet. Reuse has increased from 32% to 39% and there is no evidence if its because of high profile SOA programs or due to plain old intelligent accounting.

So the next time you read an article entitled “Is SOA dead”, just smile and throw the copy away. You know that SOA is the heart of every IT infrastructure, not just an add-on.

Read these words slowly to understand them – S e r v i c e O r i e n t e d A r c h i t e c t u r e.