To get an idea of where SOA is after the hype phase, we asked a group of analysts and thought leaders where they see it now.
Riding the hype cycle: Gartner's view
Roy Schulte is a vice president and Distinguished Analyst in Gartner Research
The vendor hype favoring SOA is still pretty high, but it is now being countered by a significant amount of developer and management disillusionment. The real change is that companies are now using SOA in production–they are realizing first hand that it is not a panacea and that its initial costs are relatively high. SOA applications are composed of many "moving parts" so they are more complex than monolithic applications. Companies using SOA face significant challenges in governance, testing, configuration, version control, metadata management, service-level monitoring, security, interoperability and other disciplines. SOA is not the cause of these problems, it is part of the solution to them. The problems are inherent in all distributed applications. The main benefit of SOA is the shorter time-to-change. The implementation of the first SOA application in a given business area will generally take as long or longer than it would to build the same application using a monolithic, non-SOA design style. However, subsequent SOA applications and changes to the initial SOA application are generally faster and less costly because they can leverage the SOA infrastructure and previously-built services.
