Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Joe McKendrick had a post on January 17th entitled, “SOA reaches out to the cloud – will business follow?” He discusses Dion Hinchcliffe’s prediction that in 2007, SOA will open up more to the Internet cloud. Dion had cited a McKinsey and Company survey that stated that 48% of CIOs surveyed are planning to open their SOAs “to the cloud” in 2007. Joe inquires as to what this means to the SOA business case.

My own thought is that it’s not about the SOA business case. SOA doesn’t justify opening services up to the cloud. It’s the other way around. If the business needs to communicate with external parties in a system-to-system interaction, guess what, you need SOA. I don’t think there’s anything new here, and clearly, many of the early SOA efforts that have been presented at conferences reflect this.

A friend of mine used to work for Rockwell Collins and had presented on their SOA efforts, which largely was around providing Web Services to their corporate partners who previously required a person to log into an extranet portal to interact. The business hadn’t changed. Their business partners wanted to take some of the human element out of the business processes in interacting with them, and to do so, needed services. One could even argue whether this was really SOA or not. The system that they have today, clearly is a component of an enterprise SOA, but obviously, there were not services behind their existing portal that were simply opened up. They needed to rip apart the existing system and expose services.

So, my own opinion is that I’m not all that excited about this prediction. Companies need to do business. Often times, that business requires interaction between two or more companies. Can SOA help in that interaction? Absolutely. On the flipside, however, is SOA really opening up new interactions between businesses that previously didn’t exist, or is it simply allowing those interactions to be more efficient? There may be some smaller opportunities that have gone unnoticed. A friend of mine, Fred Domke of Business Integration Technology, brought up the subject of office supplies over a lunch. Every large enterprise needs office supplies, but how many of them have optimized the supply chain with it, leveraging SOA and BPM technologies? It’s probably not something that’s high up on any CIO’s list, but I’d bet that there is some potential savings there.

I have previously posted on the topic of outsourcing and said that SOA doesn’t necessarily mean any more or any less outsourcing, but it should mean a higher rate of success. Organizations should have a better handle on the boundaries that make up their systems, and as a result, have a better handle on where the key integration points are. At the same time, this effort could open up new opportunities, but I think those will be driven by the business strategy, not by the technology.

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