SOA. It’s back… but it’s got more sparkle.

I’ve been working in high-tech marketing roles for over 20 years now and every time some new marketing collateral comes across my desk and “I get it”, I get excited. As a matter of fact, my first job in a high tech company was as a marketing assistant to an R&D group at BBN Systems and Technologies. They were introducing a very innovative product called BBN Slate which was a multi-media editor for Unix. Because my previous jobs involved word processing (Wang), spreadsheet analysis (Lotus), and creating pretty charts (DEC/VMS – yes, really), “I got it” and I was committed to championing it. I loved every minute of it. Well, in 2007 I was tasked to optimize the Progress Software website for SOA. We already had great traction for the enterprise service bus (ESB), but not specifically for service-oriented architecture (SOA). Well, “I got it”, got going and started optimizing for SOA Infrastructure – a popular long tail term at the time - less than two months later. As a matter of fact, this blog was once the SOA Infrastructure blog.

In January of 2009, Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton group published the blog post SOA is Dead; Long Live Services. The industry had a lot of fun with that. Now, I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but suddenly Progress stopped talking about SOA and they asked me to change the name of this blog. I was sad, I admit it.

This responsive business integration diagram was taken from a presentation by Hub Vandervoort, CTO, Enterprise Infrastructure. Listen to the archive.

Well yesterday I saw some sparkle. We announced our new Responsive Business Integration (RBI) suite. Truth be told, I’ve known about it for a few months because I had to post the content and work on my SEO plan. I know it’s not nice to play favorites, but I was delighted to see my favorite Progress technology/products back in the game – Actional and Sonic. And, I’ve concluded that the RBI suite is SOA pimped up! It’s taking the existing service and application foundation most enterprises already have (or are building) and it’s enhancing it with semantics, policy management and mediation. The Progress RBI suite is going to allow businesses to decouple systems which will give them improved visibility, agility and the ability to change.

Read more about Progress Responsive Business Integration. And check out a great presentation by Progress customer Southern Union Company. They built their enterprise integration strategy around RBI and didn't even know it.

For the lack of a better term, do you think RBI it is our next-generation SOA? Give us your comments!