Sorry, Kids: APIs Have Not And Will Not Kill SOA
Blog: Randy Heffner (Forrester)
As I move about the industry talking about APIs (application programming interfaces) and the API economy — which hold important and transformative business opportunities — I’m frequently confronted with disparaging remarks about SOA (service-oriented architecture), as if it’s passé, gone, finito. It’s often in the way of (uninformed) assumptions about SOA. I hear things like, “SOA failed because it was too difficult” or “People do REST APIs now, they don’t do SOA” or other such bunk.
I’ll be the first to extol the importance and benefits of APIs, but the tales of SOA’s failure and demise are simply wrong (I really do like APIs; see this report). I had a powerful reminder of all this while attending IBM’s IMPACT conference this week. First off, I arrived late to one customer’s plain-vanilla “this is our enterprise SOA journey” session only to be refused entry because the room was over capacity. Glancing over the conference program, there were at least eight such sessions representing four continents and at least five vertical industries. I attended five of them and also had lunch with another SOA leader. The stories could all be summarized by the following plot line:
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