There has been a lot of talk about unsuccessful SOA projects during the last couple of years. Some analysts have gone as far as pronouncing SOA dead. The truth is there is nothing wrong with SOA, but it has often been the victim of “identity theft”: Web Services technologies and Middleware products pretend to be the architectural blueprint for your SOA. However, SOA’s true identity lies in the Best Practices for Service Orientation, a well defined architecture blueprint, and Service Oriented development processes that we can rely on to achieve predictable results.

Many companies have embraced a SOA approach for development and integration projects. Now they are embarking on the next phase – a more systematic adoption of Service-Oriented practices. However, simply buying into Middleware technologies like Enterprise Service Bus and the latest generation of development tools is not sufficient for successful implementation of an Enterprise SOA. It is time to expand our view on SOA: how can we assess the maturity level of our organization and define a roadmap for future projects? How do we navigate the increasing number of standards and overlapping product offerings? Governance and security have to be our top priorities, and we need to prepare our service based applications to run in a Cloud without requiring costly modifications.