SOA Economics
I was going to add this as a comment to Alastair's recent post about SOA The Economics of Agility but, I wanted to expand on my comment. I think he has unearthed a very interesting point. When the up-front costs of setting up a SOA properly are examined, it's not that different from the same up-front costs the telcos faced when they first started building their networks almost a century ago. A huge infrastructure was required to be put in place well before the last mile could actually be delivered (switches, hubs, cables, directories, sub-stations, human routers, etc.). Maybe we should look to how cellular/wireless telecom has flourished in places recently where there was no classic telco infrastructure in place. There was certainly a master plan for deployment and management but, installation was incremental and flexible. Surely if deployments for entire countries can be logically designed and planned, we ought to be able to do the same in an enterprise.
A SOA without at least a registry and repository quickly devolves from a small collection of services to a P2P mess. Once a P2P network reaches a certain size, it basically becomes unmanageable. However, P2P networks flourish because they are so easy and cheap to set up. It's the classic pay-me-now or pay-me-later argument. If we can find the line between keeping the agility of a P2P network vs. the cost-effective management capabilities of a SOA for a particular organization, the move to a full-fledged SOA not only makes economic sense, it makes obvious sense. The problem is, there's no recipe; however, it's not a mystery, either. That's how the wireless carriers grew, right?
Posts
1 comments:
Bill
Interesting analogy. I recall Orange building their wireless network in the UK. I have no inside information but as an external spectator it seemed that early coverage was poor and focussed on the most important areas (e.g. major cities) but because the product was otherwise good and competitively priced subscribers grew and Orange continued to build the network and rapidly increase coverage.
In the SOA analogy, focussing on the big cities (best business cases) then filling in the gaps later could be a way to cost justification.
However, the importance of addressing local areas of pain is also that it's much easier to deliver a small win than a big bang. Successful delivery of any size builds confidence in the solution and the number of subscribers (or business guys that buy in to SOA) increases.
One other thing that Orange did well was advertise to increase the subsciber base. This is another area that IT people could be better at in my opinion.
Post a Comment