Will SOA Open to the Cloud in 2007?
by Joe McKendrick
Ironically, while the original purpose of Web services has been to smooth the friction of e-business between organizations or consumers, that’s not where these specs and standards have gained the most traction in the enterprise space. Until now, most service-oriented architecture deployments have been inside the walls of the enterprise, limited to pilots, demos, or singling out specific business process flows.
My colleague over at the ZDNet blogging consortium, Dion Hinchcliffe, says this closed-SOA scenario may begin to change over the coming year. For example, a new survey shows close to half of CIOs are looking at extending services to trading partners — the first stage of provisioning services to the Internet cloud.
The main roadblock to b-to-b and b-to-c Web services –and by extension, SOA — has been security. Enterprises understandably have many issues — and face extreme liabilities — with opening up their systems and data to outside parties. Dion cautions that security will remain an obstacle to extending services beyond the firewall.
Nevertheless, there is an unstoppable convergence taking place been internal SOA and the Internet cloud. Dion cites a McKinsey and Company survey which found that nearly half of CIOs (48 percent) are planning to open their SOAs “to the cloud” in 2007 — the cloud being “where their current and potential trading partners are.”
Dion observes that all new technologies typically start inside the firewall, and are then extended to trading partners within a few years. Dion quotes another ZDNet colleague, Phil Wainewright, who made this astute observation, based on Dion’s premise that Web 2.0 is the “global SOA”:
“Once your software becomes a service in the cloud, it opens up the potential to link it up with other services that are out there. For many vendors and users this is still a barely dawning realization, but it’s of fundamental importance. In many ways, the Internet cloud is one great global SOA — still very rudimentary in many ways, but flexible enough to accommodate different levels of sophistication, and evolving fast. Leading-edge SaaS providers use the Internet not only as a delivery mechanism to deliver their services to customers but also as an aggregation platform to enhance and extend their own capabilities by linking up with third-party services.”
As I noted above, such a convergence actually began over the past decade, as the Web services and protocols developed to help e-business were applied to internal integration projects. Now, this work will be turned back inside out again.
