Last week I was on the SoaSymposium in the WorldTrade Center in Rotterdam. The theme of this years episode was apparently "Next Generation SOA". On before hand I wondered what they meant with it. Apparently I missed the blog of Anne Thomas Mane that stated that SOA is dead.
It reminded me of my own blog post on the subject. In that blog-post I opposed to the statement of soa-experts of a Dutch ICT weeklet, where SOA was declared dead in favour of EDA. Because I could not remember exactly on what article I reacted back then, I got a little anxious to get in touch with her. But the reason that Anne declared SOA dead was because of the hype that rose around the acronym by the vendors, customers and media. The acronym got so loaded with pre-assumptions that it did not stand for what it promised anymore. And so many SOA projects fail because customers think they could buy the magic box of a vendor that solve every problem. Or the magic hat of the Pixar Magician Presto. And of course vendor's would love to sell this to them. If they could... To declare SOA dead as a hype with all its false promises and focus on Service Orientation, I second completely. You can't buy or sell SOA, neither as a "Silver bullet", nor as a "Magic hat". It reminded me on this company that would sell an integration product on a blade-server. Put it in a rack and your ERP's are integrated. Yeah, right. I assume that the actual implementation is less magic.

Thomas Erl and Anne had a session to cast out the "Evil SOA" and welcome the "Good SOA". I liked the music of Mike Oldfield, but after a while it got too pressing and looped through the very first part of Tubular Bells, that it almost cast me out. But it got me the nice Soa Patterns book of Thomas Erl.

I think with Thomas and Anne that Service Orientation is very important and grow in importance. But together with EDA. Well actually, I think EDA is not an architecture on it self. As with Soa and cloud: if we're going to hype this idea we fall in the same faults again. But as stated in my former post, I think that Events and Services are (or should) two thightly coupled ideas. No loose coupling here. You use these ideas to loosely couple your functionalities. But Services are useless without events. And events (either coming through an esb or as a stream) are quite useless without services that process them.

For the rest it was a good event to network. Met a few former colleagues and business-partners. Or people with I had co-acquaintances. I saw a nice presentation of Sander Hoogendoorn and Twan van der Broek on agile SOA projects combined with ERP. I'd like to learn more on that.