Over the past few months, though, I’ve started to pick away at SOA once again – it feels to me like we’re at the stage where there are some interesting real-world stories to dig into, and at the same time there’s still a lot of people looking for answers to some straightforward questions about the nature of SOA and how to deliver value from a SOA investment.

With this in mind, I was excited to see the launch of a “SOA Manifesto“, styled after the Agile Manifesto – which has had a significant impact on expanding awareness and understanding of Agile development techniques. I was intrigued to see that Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group, of “SOA is Dead” fame, was one of the signatories – so I decided to ask her about her involvement in the drawing up of the manifesto. I know that Anne and her team do a lot of case study and best practice research on SOA, so I was interested to hear why she wanted to get involved. Below are my notes from our conversation.

NWD: What kinds of issues have you seen that made you want to get involved in the SOA manifesto?

ATM: We currently have over 300 signatories to the Manifesto [Now around 475], and all the group members are blogging/tweeting about it. We’re trying hard to make sure that we get as many signatories as possible, in other words. But, just as was the case with the Agile manifesto, there’s no group intention to directly commercialise this [in delivery of a body of knowledge, training, etc].

I’ve looked at a lot of the commentary and criticism of the SOA Manifesto out there, and a lot of it seems to be about saying “so what?”. But as Anne rightly points out above, the fact that the principles in the Manifesto are quite applicable to many types of business-technology change initiative doesn’t make them worthless. The fact is, SOA implementation *is* a business-technology change initiative.

I think the other thing to bear in mind, when looking at the SOA Manifesto and SOA analysis and commentary generally, is that no-one in their right mind is saying that SOA is always the right answer when it comes to application implementation (though in my view there’s an abstract business analysis/architecture part of SOA, reflected in OASIS’ SOA Reference Model specification work, which has general applicability across all domains). There are many technology implementation domains where SOA principles aren’t the right ones. As the Manifesto points out, SOA should be all about a set of architecture decisions that promote flexibility and agility (through things like loose coupling). In some situations, there are other factors (like extreme performance) which might trump a general desire for flexibility – or at least create interesting tensions for architects.

So – to sum up: personally I’m a fan of the SOA Manifesto. It’s not perfect, but nothing designed by committee ever is. It *is*, I think, “good enough” for what it needs to do – which is to add more weight to the argument that if you want to deliver value from SOA work, you have to continually remember to focus on  a set of IT architecture principles and avoid getting too distracted by shiny products.

Adobe seems to struggle with how to address the collaboration market opportunity. Little real progress has been made since it acquired the Connect Pro technology (then called Macromedia Breeze) … despite having technology which competes well from a functional perspective with vendors such as Cisco Webex, Microsoft and IBM (and a much slicker interface), it remains relatively unknown in this market.

You can read the full post here.

If you’re interested in our Collaboration research and Angela’s opinions in the Collaboration space, you’ll be wanting to subscribe to the feed…

The initial research delivered in the service lays out a good taste of what’s to come. Key themes we’re currently exploring include:

• Agile software delivery
• Development implications of Cloud Computing
• Developing User-Centric Software Services
• Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

As with all our services, and in line with our published research approach and principles, there’s a really good balance of analysis and advice provided – we go beyond analysis of technology trends and vendor capabilities to look in detail at best practices and market maturity.

The piece we’re most excited about right now is a report highlighting the findings of a global survey on Cloud Computing we carried out in September in conjunction with our partner IASA. The report, Success with Cloud Computing: a survey of IT architects 2H09, looks at the perceptions and early experiences that IT architects have of working with Cloud Computing resources and services. It makes for pretty interesting reading. To provide a taster:

• 54% of respondents highlighted that their organisations are already investing in Cloud Computing, or are planning to planning to invest at some point in the coming year.
• 61% of those with current investments are investing to support IT development and testing work.
• Despite market immaturity, 22% of those with current investments already report receiving ROI.
• Proven ability to scale and support for standards are top supplier selection concerns.

You can read more about this specific report in this news release. You can also get overviews of all the launch reports by browsing our Software Delivery research library.

Bola and Ian are already working hard to bring our clients more great Software Delivery research and advice. As with all our advisory services, this new service has its own focused analyst blog which provides industry commentary as well as highlighting new research: if you want to keep up-to-date, you can subscribe to our Software Delivery blog here.

If you’d like to find out more about our new Software Delivery advisory service, we’ve provided two snappy brochures: one for enterprise IT organisations and one for vendors.

The MWD team has done a great job in putting this together – we’re looking forward to taking our business up another notch!

The talk I gave was on a recent survey we completed in association with IASA – focused on architects’ experiences of, and views on, Cloud Computing. In the second half of the interview Matt talks to me about some of the early findings from that survey.

The video interview with Matt and me is about 21 minutes long, and it’s published on Microsoft’s Channel 9. I think the discussion turned out pretty well, though I say so myself… Matt has also published an interview with the SEI’s Len Bass from the same conference btw, and that’s worth a look, definitely.

The full survey findings will be published as part of our new Software Delivery advisory service, which we’ll be launching this month. If you’re an enterprise IT practitioner and you’d like to find out more about the service here’s something for you; if you work for an IT vendor organisation, here’s some information for you.

I’d love to get feedback from you if you have time to sit through the interview… what did you think?

As you can see in our report on Sonoa, the company is making significant inroads in a critical area of service management, focused on assuring the quality-of-service delivered by APIs. The company started out selling its core technology, ServiceNet, as a service management platform for SOA implementations – but recently it’s expanded its focus to delivering enabling technology that helps media companies, SaaS providers, telcos and other service providers – as well as traditional “bricks and mortar” companies like Guardian Life which want to offer some of their internal capabilities as wholesale services – ensure that the API consumer experience is reliable and that quality can be guaranteed. MySpace, Warner Music and MTV Networks are all customers.

Now, Sonoa sees its ultimate value as enabling enterprises that want to jump “into the Cloud” – but that also need to continue to comply with policies and governance requirements – to make the leap; principally by driving up the level of API-quality trust and visibility that can exist between service providers and consumers.

In the context of this goal, the recent launch by Sonoa of a freemium-model, self-service, hosted implementation of the core ServiceNet technology under the brand “Apigee” (see www.apigee.com) is a smart development. The idea is to enable API providers, and developers consuming APIs, to quickly set up and use value-added API management services. There are already 250 customers live – evenly split between API providers, API consumers, and those who both consume and provide APIs.

We know from our research that although there’s very significant interest from organisations in the potential flexibility, time-to-market and cost profile that Cloud Computing and SaaS models can bring, security and trust remain the top concerns for those many companies that haven’t yet dipped their toes in the water. It’ll be fascinating to see if and how companies like Sonoa can drive broad, mainstream adoption of the “remixable services and data” Web 2.0 promise that has so much potential value.