The Kitchen Sink Weblog: Tales from Sun's internet facing edge

As many of you know, Sun recently bought SeeBeyond . SeeBeyond is in the Integration space in the Application Software world. It seems to have been a good move from the Analysts' perspective, in the sessions I attended at the Gartner IT/XPO Symposium, the acquistion was mentioned not less than four times, usually accompanied by the comment "Sun is now a player in the SOA space" For those of you that are SeeBeyond customers, Gartner says the acquistion is a good thing for you, because instead of buying SeeBeyond for the customer base, like a recent Oracle acquistion, the SeeBeyond acquisition plugs a gap in our offerings, so there won't be conflicting, competing product lines.

SOA, which translates to "Service Oriented Architecture", is the hyped thing of the year, according to Garner. Used to be portals, now it is SOA. There were far too many sessions to pick from on SOA or it's kissing cousin, Web Services. It depends on who you talk to, but from what I can gather, SOA is a paradigm where you have loosely coupled (or completely uncoupled) application services that can talk to each and clients. Didn't seem like a new concept to me, but what seems to be new is the supporting technology that is coming out from the industry to support keeping the services uncoupled from the clients that use them, not to mention the BPM stuff that runs on top that coordinates workflow through all these services.

While you can have SOA after a fashion without using the WebServices standards, no one seriously considers doing this. The interoperability of your services would suffer greatly if you are not using the standards.

If you read my earlier post on the death of the database, the point underlying that session is that the use of SOA leads to an universal connectivity that makes persisting certain types of information unnecessary.

So is the hype deserved? I don't know. Depends on how much interconnectivity we see across companies and organizations.