JBoss calls for SOA reality check

Service oriented architectures are not about building a grand software vision, says JBoss.

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) do not provide a magic wand for increased profitability, Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management for JBoss, warned at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego.

Red Hat is targeting its SOA products at the mass market where organisations want to deploy SOAs for select point projects.

The company is quite comfortable with leaving the high-end part of the market to specialists such as BEA Aqualogic and IBM WebSphere.

BEA, for instance, markets Aqualogic as away to reuse code for internal development projects.

Centralising the development of commonly used functionalities such as a currency conversion or sign-in features allows firms to cut costs while ensuring that the best code is used.

But Connolly believes that such an approach will fail to deliver tangible results. Most of the applications that companies currently use function just fine and have nothing to gain from a forced migration to SOAs.

"SOA should not be a 'space shuttle' project. SOA is not about making everything reusable. It's about making things that drive business processes reusable," said Connolly.

"It is not fine grained. You have to take a look at how you want to architect things today that can be used in a range of business processes."

Connolly argued that companies should deploy the technology in point projects where SOAs can improve business processes or speed up services, thereby cutting costs or gaining a competitive advantage.

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