I recently came across a SearchSOA article, which talked about Burton Group’s research that found 50% failure and 30% “non success” rates of Enterprise SOA undertakings. Not much of a surprise really, unless you start comparing the expected 20% “payout” odds with some common reference points, like, for example, winning the lottery (which as everyone knows is a complete sham).
One of the authors referred to this phenomenon and the resulting shift in attitudes towards the Service Oriented Architecture as “SOA fatigue” – a very appropriate term, which immediately brought associations with the yuppie flu and also reminded me of a recent conversation that I had with a CIO of a global company. When he asked me out of the blue “so what is it exactly that you specialize in?” the only thing I could come up with before the elevator doors opened was: “I help organizations which are disappointed in SOA”. That’s where that conversation ended (we had arrived) so I have no data points on how well this worked. However, the more I think about it, the more it seems that this really captures the focus of my work over the last several years. The work that started with a question: “what would it take to build an SOA platform of which no one could say that it is lacking anything true SOA should have?” and culminating in building the delta between the answer to the above and our platform of the day. So starting today, I decided to take 
it as my professional motto. Here it is again in bold:
I help organizations which are disappointed in SOA
Corny? – Yes. But at least not as obvious as “I sell houses” which my realtor had on his business cards, fridge magnets and “Welcome Home” slippers embroidered with his face and contact details…
