SOA 2.0 madness

Sign the petition, help put a stop to it

By Dale Vile, Freeform Dynamics • Get more from this author

Posted in Developer, 22nd June 2006 15:17 GMT

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Fed up with big analyst firms and IT vendors inventing divisive vocabulary and creating hype to further their own agendas?

Well, you're not alone. Following an attempt by some of the bigger players to introduce yet another term into the already confused area of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a group of analysts and SOA specialists, led by industry analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton (MWD), have decided to make a stand.

What's prompted this protest is the invention and promotion of the term "SOA 2.0" by the likes of Gartner and Oracle. In an initial blog entry responding to SOA 2.0 coverage, the normally mild mannered Neil Ward-Dutton of Macehitor Ward-Dutton (MWD) wrote:

I had a conversation at the back end of last year with a seasoned IT industry analyst from another UK firm about why analysts do the job they do. I think there are two camps. One (ours) sincerely believes that analysts should be good stewards of the influence they have - educating, clarifying, abstracting, comparing, acting independently, being measured, etc. It's about filtering out hype and trying to provide practical, independent advice and insight. The other is in this business to make money by whatever means possible. Often that means inventing, or perpetuating, ideas which have marginal value but which sound exciting (and thus tease out vendor marketing cash, and enterprise consulting cash). If ever there was a blatant example of the product of this latter attitude to the IT industry analyst 'profession' (I use that term *very* advisedly), SOA 2.0 is it.

At the centre of the protest is an online petition created by MWD, "because we're dumbfounded at the attempt by certain parts of the IT industry to create and give weight to the term SOA 2.0"".

Neil Ward-Dutton goes on to say: "In part, this petition is an experiment. Many people have discussed the power of the web to aggregate and demonstrate the power of individuals: but it would be good to see if, through this simple web page, we could pressure the protagonists into backtracking on SOA 2.0."

So, if you're feeling a bit anarchistic and want to sign up yourself (we at Freeform Dynamics have already), the petition can be found here. ®

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