SOA - quick wins rule..

I read this blog today by Loraine Lawson (To SOA or Not to SOA During Economic Turmoil?) and it contains so much applicability around SOA in one place, that I had to comment.

I think this blog says a lot. No doubt at all I am seeing many IT budgets being slashed and no doubt most people think SOA means big IT budgets. So, how could you not conclude SOA is stalling? Easy, because we are seeing the opposite. What is different and is reflected in the article, is that we are clearly seeing people looking to more innovative approaches to SOA to match the depleting budgets. We see this because OpenSpan is a perfect fit. As the article makes clear and we all now know, there is real value from quick iterative approaches to SOA. However, since SOA often means a rewrite of working (for many years) business processes, or a lot of integration around existing processes, it’s hard to imagine the words quick, iterative and SOA all being used in the same article, let alone the same sentence!

But, that is exactly what OpenSpan is all about. Taking working legacy applications that users use every singe day and quickly wrapping them to expose their workflows as services. Real-world, working Web Services that can be consumed by other enterprise services or other automated workflows. Take the applications out of the users eyes and hands and have those existing application workflows become a set of services! Everyone gets to see quickly what services offer up the most ROI. The ROI (which can be big with quick wins) can go towards funding a long-term strategy of the re-architecture. Since many existing legacy applications are too hard to rewrite anyway, OpenSpan’s almost “instant-on” web service enablement of existing applications has never been more applicable in today’s’ economy. The continued OpenSpan growth says it all. Feel free to comment.