Two challenges for SOA and Web 2.0

I was presenting to one of our important clients at work this week doing my "what is SOA" pitch around Business Service architecture with another set of technical vendor assessments (due out soon) and the CTO from the client raise a few key points which I think are worth giving some air

1. SOA and Web 2.0 aren't "simpler" in fact its a whole lots more complex, each generation of IT has created more complexity, and SOA + Web 2.0 is liable to be worse
2. Reliability is a nightmare in a distributed service based world

To be honest its great to speak to someone who isn't drinking from the vendor cool-aid but it really does highlight the problems that are currently being glossed over. I've talked before about the challenge of async that everyone seems to ignore but the challenge is actually bigger than just async, its all about the increase challenges around versioning when you have more things to version, its about the increase challenge of worrying about networks and external services and still delivering a decent service.

I'll deal with point 2 in my next post, but the key here is that to make SOA deliver business agility it means that IT will have to deal with a more complex IT problem, that means there has to be a busienss value for the solution or you are better off putting everything in a mainframe.

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