Eschewing the Gartner tendency for crystal ball gazing, Massimo Pezzini, vice president and distinguished analyst Gartner Inc., began that track session with a brief history of SOA. He noted that when he started working for Gartner in Europe in 1996, he was already going to IT departments with a paper outlining the principle of SOA. In many cases, he found he was evangelizing the converted.
"Customers were doing SOA then although they weren't calling it that," he told his audience. They tended to use the terms of the 1990s for their projects, calling them client/server. Pezzini said that is the secret few SOA gurus want to let out of the bag: SOA is an update of classic client/server.
