Larry Ellison’s quote on Cloud Computing was pretty awesome:

“The software industry is more fashion driven than ladies apparel!!!”

Which isnt neccesarily a bad thing. The time cycles of fashion and technology have collided and given birth to “this year’s pink” iPod and “Blue is the new Green” cell phones. Hats off to Steve Jobs.

Relevant to my previous “End of SOA SOA Sky is Falling Henny Penny 2.0” blog post, Frank Kenney from Gartner posted a great blog about the current state of SOA.

Lets face is SOA is deeply unfashionable right now.

The bottom line as alluded to my tongue in cheek headline is that Enterprises have very little choice in the matter. Regardless of the framing of it, they have a deep problem with heterogeneous architecture, legacy systems, the need to externalize declarative logic, regulatory pressure, ongoing cost control issues, loss of control of IT to consultants and vendors and the inability to adapt to changing business requirements, especially business process.

Whether this architectural response is called SOA, turnip farming, platforms for cloud services or bananafish, there is really only one rational response which is abstraction… and the stabilization of Enterprise IT along interface lines that are coarse grained will continue and this trend will seperate the successful IT shops from the losers. And the losers will be swept away.

So all the clever analysts who give you the nudge and the wink and say yeah, that SOA thing didnt work, sure they have to make their money somehow. And they have to keep writing about something new, maybe that will be the “Cloud”.

The bottom line is that the downturn is a good time to clean house. The IT shops that come out of the downturn with a revamped infrastructure strategy can capture market share. Be bold when others are fearful (Warren Buffet’s words, not mine). Call it whatever you want, but focus on stabilizing and abstracting your legacy of heterogenaety and complexity behind coarsely grained interfaces–because with virtualization and cloud, everything underneath is up for grabs. And with BPM, Mashups, Enterprise 2.0 and trendy trend 3.0, everything up top is also up for grabs.

My 2 cents,
Miko