Bob Serr responded to my recent post on the disruptive (or lack thereof) impact of SOA and Web 2.0 on the enterprise, and elaborates on what he sees as the differences between SOA and the emerging Enterprise 2.0 paradigm.

Bob is employing SOA in his own work, but points out that, ultimately, Enterprise 2.0 holds forth a much grander vision for enterprise transformation than SOA can deliver. “SOA is a technology; it is a way to build and deliver applications,” he explains. “Enterprise 2.0, however, is so much more than that because it represents a completely new way for people to communicate and interact.”

As a result, he cautions, “tightly coupling the success (and hype) of SOA to Enterprise 2.0 actually belittles the promise of Enterprise 2.0.”

Bob also provides additional evidence of the low-level impact of SOA, thus far:

“One piece of data that represents the foundation of my beliefs that SOA is possibly being over-hyped are the statistics of SOA based APIs and “Mashups” from the Programmable Web. From Dion Hinchcliffe’s post, The growth of mashups continued throughout 2006, as of December 13, 2006 there were 348 APIs registered and 1350 mashups. While these numbers are more impressive than say 0, they are nothing compared with the number of Websites that were created in the previous revolution, which was the World Wide Web.”

I agree with Bob that SOA will be a gradual, plodding, fairly undramatic process for most companies. Over the long run, SOA, in combination with other methodologies and technologies, will smooth the way for greater flexibility. A good way to view SOA is as an internal Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.