SOA Architectures Touting Big Wins, But Could Fail At A Large Scale

In my previous post, G-Man commented that SOA was a sorely overused acronym. This may be true.Almost all the RFPs going out have at least one question regarding support for SOA. Most, if not all, policy administration system vendors list SOA compliance as a feature of their systems. Both carriers and policy administration vendors are locked in this dance, a dance that we've done before.

SOA is the latest architecture to hit the scene. The benefits being touted are the same that were promoted with past architectures. Having gone through the millenium revolution, I'm seeing the promises being made again. With '00 we had the opportunity to fail at a small scale; SOA lets us fail at a large scale. I seriously doubt SOA will improve the ability to do an out-of-sequence endorsement. It will allow information to be interchanged among different systems. It's still too early in the adoption cycle to see if SOA will live up to the advertised benefits.

By Howard E. Kennedy www.iso.com