Do small businesses need SOA?
Many CTOs argue that SOA is for the big enterprises with huge investments in legacy solo applications. To some extend this arguement is true. However, there is still some room for small and medium size businesses (SMBs) to jump aboard the SOA train and eat some of the fruits of SOA. SMBs can take advantage of SOA design principles by developingt their internal software modules as services components while at the same time staying away from the middleware. The benefits will be a strong tie between the Information System the IT department develops and the business requirements of the company. Thinking in terms of services pushes IT professinals to think like the business professionals .
The Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) principles will still be use to implement the invidual services. However, OOAD should stay with the boundaries of the IT department. When the business and IT guys meet to identify and define the Information system requirements. Every body should speak one language. The Service Language.
One of the draw back for SMBs implementing SOA is the cost of affording the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) middleware and daily managemant of the middleware infrastructure. The good news is that the middleware will eventually disappear as the trends show that most organization are moving towards the adaption of open standards ( web services standards) .
When we will eventually say bye bye to the heavy middleware infrastructures, the SOA design principles will stay with us. SOA will still remain one of the key technology to align IT initiatives with business objectives.