The Underwhelming Success of SOA

Sitting at the Gartner Conference I read the ZDNet article on "The best way to sell SOA? Try Web 2.0 techniques."

My comment on that post is reproduced below.

SOA and Web 2.0 - Convergence of the Enterprise Mashup

SOA has been an underwhelming success for many organizations, as the rough numbers demonstrate in my blog post on Portals and Mashups (http://ekive.blogspot.com/2008/03/portals-and-mashups-putting-powr-of-soa.html) from the Gartner Portals and Collaboration Conference. Web 2.0 in the shape of the Enterprise Mashup tool has the potential to transform the success of SOA by allowing end users and technical analysts in the enterprise to self-serve their needs themselves by creating lightweight composite applications that amalgamate disparate information feeds to create new value added information streams. We may need heavyweight back-end services that are at the heart of many SOA initiatives but the increasing trend towards disposable applications says there is a valuable role for Enterprise Mashups that can be created quickly and easily and then jettisoned when no longer necessary.