SAP and Oracle are chasing the SOA finnish line ,SAP claims to be SOA enabled by 2007 and Oracle by 2008.
Will these dates be realistic or is there too much hype against reality.
Too many organizations are being asked to lay out funding for "SOA" initiatives that will not bear fruit, only to be looked upon two or three years from now with disdain, as money pits that never delivered their promised potential. (Joining the list with CRM, sales force automation, ERP software, executive information systems) What's troubling in this case is SOA is an even more amorphous term and concept than other more IT-centric projects. We run the risk of having SOA dismissed as a failure.
How can we address such perceptions-in-waiting? Education, education, education. Through education about what the building-block standards really do for the business; through targeted, well-focused, specific implementation projects, such as saving development resources through reuse of code that formerly required many hours of development time, or connecting up several back-end legacy systems through a Web-centric interface. And, most of all, SOA needs enlightened management, goaded by an individual taking on an evangelist role inside the organization. SOA can work, but it runs the risk of being derailed by inflated expectations and under-educated management.
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