In an earlier post I wrote a response to a post by Anne Thomas Manes that SOA is dead. The crux of my post was that although the name SOA has been battered by snake oil salesmen who have been more interested in making money out of the enabling technologies that they provide than focusing on (in Ms Manes’ words) the "spectacular commitment to change" required to make a success of it, SOA is more important than ever and therefore definitely not dead.

In a follow-up post, Ms Manes pointed out that  "SOA is a bad word. And yes, doing SOA is a good thing. (And we need to keep doing it!) But no, we do not need to come up with a new name. Emphatically not."

This morning my RSS feeds had an update from Ms Manes’ blog again. She points to an article by Dan Woods of Forbes.com and says of his article that she is "pleased to see that Dan read beyond the first paragraph, and he understands the core message of my post (i.e., ‘SOA has been disappointing and that services should be a key focus’)" and then goes on later in her post to say:

"Dan recommends an incremental approach to SOA: Just build services as you need them on a project-by-project basis, and at some point in the future you can go back and consolidate the services you’ve built and somehow derive some architectural consistency. Unfortunately, this strategy invariably leads to Just a Bunch of Web Services (JABOWS) because the future consolidation step almost never happens. The result is too many services, too many moving parts, and too many brittle connections. Systems wind up being more expensive and more fragile than ever before."

I wonder if Ms Manes realizes that she advocated exactly the same thing that Mr Woods advocated and then went on to slam the idea? In her original post she argued that the focus should shift from SOA to building services, and yet here she is arguing that just building services will result in fragile, expensive systems. Ms Manes is just flat-out contradicting herself.

Without the overall service-oriented architecture you will not get a cohesive system. So recommending building services without an overall service-oriented architecture is a bad idea… as Ms Manes suggests.

At the same time, Ms Manes does not like the term "SOA" because of the negative connotation it has garnered thanks to a lack of understanding that business need to make a significant commitment to change and there are unscrupulous individuals trying to profit from a technology buzzword. For those reasons, Ms Manes believes SOA is dead. Ms Manes, however, does not believe we should get rid of the word "SOA".

In her latest post Ms Manes makes the statement that "One of the reasons SOA ‘died’…" Just stop right there!!!

Whether you like the term SOA or not, service-oriented architecture is a critical part of Enterprise 2.0 and requires a significant investment in both the architecture and development of services. Service-orientation has to drive the way that development teams build applications today and into the future.I hate to tell you this, Ms Manes, but SOA is not dead. There are numerous organizations who are still working extremely hard on a service-oriented architecture and many more are seeing the importance of it more and more with things like mashups and social networking becoming tightly integrated into the business.

I don’t disagree that SOA requires governance, management, leadership, skills, practices and a commitment to change. But remember that change is hard and takes time. In fact, it takes more time as the organization gets larger. A weak economy has caused businesses to refocus priorities and in many cases this has meant cutting projects that are not directly contributing to the bottom line. Companies are not willing to shell out several hundred thousand on projects for which the ROI may only be seen in 5 to 10 years. For some companies, that is the amount of change that SOA requires and simply buying an ESB is not going to resolve the issues.

A service-oriented architecture does not come from the presence of an ESB. It is definitely not characterized by the availability of a bunch of services in an organization. SOA is a paradigm shift like event-driven programming was a paradigm shift and object-orientation was a paradigm shift. All of them came with their share of snake oil salesmen too and nowadays those paradigms are standard in business.

SOA is alive and well… and growing.