Netrics HD

In his recent ebizQ.net article SOA, Phase 2: Toward a Loosely Coupled World, Joe McKendrick declared:

“I am a passionate believer in the power of technology, as an enabler of entrepreneurship and organizational transformation. I have long advocated flattening the organizational hierarchy, and pushing decision-making down to the managers and employees who deal with customers and production on a day-to-day basis.”

I couldn’t agree more.  Nothing has a more powerful effect on an organization’s ability to succeed than putting the right technology into the hands of front line employees.

There is an unstoppable industry trend gaining daily momentum where organizations are increasingly looking for solutions with cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) as the new paradigm for enterprise architecture.

“Cloud computing is pushing some software vendors to change their models to component delivery,” explains McKendrick.  “This makes plenty of room not only for small start-ups, but also for development shops within traditional enterprises that have great ideas.”

Historically, many of the most powerful new trends in technology originated from small entrepreneurial vendors.  By focusing on enhancing their highly specialized components, they can provide a great source of rapid innovation.  Therefore, small software vendors, whose solutions are designed for deployment using a loosely coupled service-oriented architecture (SOA), may be the industry’s small giants upon whose broad shoulders we will all be standing in the not-to-distant future.

And according to Mohan Sawhney, professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management:

“The best-run companies are becoming orchestrators of networks of services.  Five years from now, the concept of an application will be obsolete.  They will all be services, combined, mixed, matched and reused as needed.”

Therefore, when it comes to enterprise architecture — service-oriented is future-oriented.

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