Revival or no Death at all: Burton Group and The Lazarus Effect

On January 05, 2009 Burton Group's analyst Ann Thomas Manes published her famous blog post SOA is Dead; Long Live Services. She arguied that "SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”.

Recently, Burton Group published a Research note titled: The Lazarus Effect: SOA Returns. According to this Research Note, SOA demised during the Recession, but SOA is returning now after the recession. In Burton Group's words: 

"As the global economy struggles back to health and organizations seek to redefine themselves and make strategic investments, many organizations are reconsidering SOA".

Unfortunately, I did not read Frank Herbert's and Bill Ransom's Science Fiction book titled The Lazarus Effect, so I could only imagine that it is about recovering from death or almost death. However, in the real world, SOA was far from death, despite of the Recession and despite of many SOA initiatives failures.

It is only another example of IT Evolution Spiral Model I described in a previous post.

It should be noticed that in a presentation titled: SOA a means for Leveraging Business Development? I argued that Recession may be beneficial for SOA initiatives in case of organizations adapting their SOA initiatives for the new circumstances. 

 

It should also be noticed that Burton Group was acquired by Gartner.

 Leading Gartner analysts' Research Notes (e.g. Research Notes written by Yefim Natis, Roy Schulte) never shared the opinion that SOA is Dead, but view it from more balanced perspective: Less enthusiasm during Hype preiod and no premature death notices.