1.4. IS SOA THE LATEST INDUSTRY FAD?
The pace of change within the business community, and information technology in particular, rightly leads the savvy professional to question whether SOA is merely a fad. Technologies and trends come and go, so what makes SOA any different? Several factors point to SOA's longevity.
SOA Is a Natural Evolution
To start with, service orientation evolved out of mature application and integration efforts in the late 1990s, and came on the scene around 2000-2001. Since that time, the adoption of Web Services and service orientation among vendors and private industry has been tremendous (some research pegs the number as high as 90% among Fortune 500s). Federal and state governments are even engaging in early service oriented initiatives. Virtually every vendor of enterprise systems now has an SOA initiative to one degree or another. Some enterprises are able to jumpstart their SOA efforts merely by upgrading to the latest releases for their major COTS systems. Even CICS mainframes have gotten on the bandwagon. The latest version of CICS includes native support for Web Services. This is, in fact, the trend throughout the industry.
SOA Has Staying Power
All indicators point to SOA remaining a viable and lasting part of the enterprise. Consider the following quote from Gartner in a November 2006 research note:[]
SOA will be a durable change in application architecture, more like the relational data model than shorter-lived concepts, such as distributed ...
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