In the technology markets I have been working in for the past 20 years, July and August are typically slow. The promotion calendar drops back a few notches, Europe takes a holiday, and in general life is restored however briefly to a more manageable pace and rate of change. Not so this summer.
As I read the markets, we are suddenly staring at what I have often referred to as "The SOA Tipping Point." Beyond the SOA tipping point, we move from speculating about SOA adoption to discussing the real, tangible benefits that SOA projects are delivering to customers. We spend less time evangelizing the SOA vision, and get more confident and aggressive touting our real project experience.
A couple of interesting posts and articles reinforce this view that we are about to turn this critical corner. On CNNMoney.com, a reference to Aberdeen Group's recent research suggesting that full-bore SOA projects, supported by the right infrastructure for SOA, are delivering far higher ROI's than simpler, web services-only approaches.
You also have David Linthicum challenging the Aberdeen insight... with the quotable, "This just in, fire is hot" jab. Of course Linthicum has been either building SOA technology companies (remember Grand Central?) or on the speech circuit talking about it longer than I've been alive, so one must apply the appropriate mass and volume of sodium chloride (read: little).
SOA What? This is just the latest skirmish - but it captures a laggard (Aberdeen Group, largely a research-for-hire firm at this point) and a bleeding edger (Linthicum) slugging it out over whether we are hitting mainstream (Aberdeen) or whether we hit mainstream a while ago (Linthicum). This kind of argument, and the bogus blogosphere heat, is symptomatic of our passage through the aforementioned tipping point. And for a contender like Progress, this means we can expect to see this heat give way to light as we all continue the SOA journey.