SOA Darwinism & Social BPM - A Fireside Chat with Miko Matsumura

DZone recently sat down with Miko Matsumura, vice president and deputy CTO of SOA products at Software AG webMethods. In this interview, Matsumura describes how cloud computing, virtualization and the current economic climate are helping facilitate the 'evolution' of SOA and what this ultimately means for the developer.  He also sheds some light on 'Social BPM', the driving force behind Software AG's recently announced AlignSpace platform.    

DZone: Miko, it's nice to touch base with you again. There have been a lot of developments since we last spoke with you on the state of SOA, so I thought we'd jump right into it. In a widely publicized blog entry titled, "SOA is Dead; Long Live Services," Burton Group analyst Anne Thomas Manes proclaimed that:

"SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession." She goes on to say that SOA is now survived by its offspring, technology such as mashups, business process management, software as a service, cloud computing, and all the other architectural approaches that depend on "services."

What are your thoughts on this?

Miko Matsumura: Yes, I've had a great opportunity to hang out with Anne at various conferences and I just got an email from her this morning. We've been sharing slides on a variety of topics. I'm going to send her my slides from this morning's Enterprise Architect virtual conference.

I got her slides on "SOA is Dead" and the eulogy of SOA. Obviously I read her blog, which is a pretty exciting. See, in her blog post, there's only one picture and it's a picture of a dinosaur that says "SOAsaurus" written on the side of it. There's this huge meteor coming in from outer space that's labeled, "The Economy."

I think that her hypothesis is that this huge meteoric impact kind of smashes this SOAsaurus and it's kind of extinction time. Really, what we're seeing across the landscape, is we're actually not seeing extinction time. We're seeing evolution time.

The thing that's really fascinating - it kind of fits in with the model of evolution that's espoused by Stephen J. Gould, the late and great evolutionary biologist from Harvard. He really cited evolution as being punctuated equilibrium, which is that if things are stable and steady for a long time and then all of a sudden, boom! things are changed and evolution kind of leaps forward.

If you actually look at what happened to the dinosaur, in evolutionary times, the dinosaur itself actually is not extinct, rather that the ornithischian dinosaurs evolved flight. If you actually look - I'm looking outside my window right now and I see a bird sitting on a lamp post. That's really where the dinosaurs went.

It is a direct linkage and so adaptation has occurred. I think that that's really where we are with respect to SOA. There's a lot of adaptation, a kind of glorious, universal message of unification of architecture is being revised in that the economic position is forcing much more of a project-oriented mentality.

The thing that I think is important to try to piece back together from these pieces is that if you actually look at the statement that Anne made in her blog, SOA is survived by its offspring - mashups, BPM, SaaS, and cloud computing and other architectural approaches that depend on services.

The thing that I think is interesting about that statement, though, is that if all of those notions, if you treat them as being little mini projects, little development projects, they're certainly interesting. I think that unless you can actually take an architectural approach and re-integrate in a new environment this kind of directionality of creating an engine, a platform of technology for your organization, then I think you're kind of sliding back downhill towards architectural degradation.

Architectural degradation, from a developer perspective, I think it's really important to think about, because architecture is really kind of an economic imperative. The reason why I think this is worthwhile to think about from a developer perspective is that, you may as a developer be poking yourself into the cloud. You may hop up on EC2 and start racking up a bunch of cool applications up there. Or you may be doing some kind of mashup or you may be consuming services or whatever. The thing that I think is the key point is that you're doing so within the context of your organization.