Is SOA dead?

An obituary on SOA was written on the Burton Group blog post at the turn of this year. This subject has been propagated over the net so many times over. The idea is the economy hurled a massive comet into the SOA universe and freeze it into an ice age.

According to the post, "With the tight budgets of 2009, most organizations have cut funding for their SOA initiatives." Which also said, "SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on 'services'".

I can accept some of the points mentioned, but somehow I got a feeling that there are others who simply "forget" that SOA is dead.  Service-Oriented is an architecture. Talking about how various systems are inter-connected via services, is... talking about a Service-Oriented Architecture ie: SOA. At JavaOne this year, topics on SOA still has loads of audiences.  While it's understandable that many adopters out there got hang up on the term SOA rather than focusing on the "service oriented" part, SOA is still alive and well.

While I agree that mashups and cloud computing has gained significant audience from the masses, after almost the same amount of time to prepare the birth of a baby, the report on the demise of SOA seems a little premature. Give it another wave of financial meltdown in the stock market and the big boys selling expensive solutions may start to wither lacking its food source.

The "free" renegades of the solutions, just like anything viral and nimble will rebirth itself as the survivors of the industry. The needs to provide bridges between the old and expensive to the new and agile by focusing on systems inter-connectivity using services will keep the architecture alive absorbing solutions that make sense for SOA to keep going.