SOA is far far away

Recently I saw the movie Shrek-3 and the kingdom which Shrek is supposed to rule is call 'Far Far Away'.

Sounds funny!.

Here, I intend to draw parallel with this syllable with SOA.

In my company, recently, one of my colleagues gave a presentation on 'SOA - A Myth or Reality' and concluded it is a reality. I was telling myself that isnt it already a reality and why are re-opening the debate?

But, I feel the question is indeed valid, after reading a recent AMR research on SOA/BPM. AMR has clearly articulated that the toolset for creating and managing BPM and SOA is really not in a very matured stage, for adaption to be quicker.

Each vendor has its own architecture, style and suite of tools to model the business processes and architect the services. Are these tools from different vendors interoperable?. Absolutely no!. So, if the objective of SOA is all about integration and standardization, then you are expected to follow un-integrated set of tools and methods.

I was thinking for an ERP shop, its wise to venture into SOA with ERP supplied SOA products...the AMR report invalidates the very same assumption...

Some of the interesting points...

1. The SOA/BPM tools market is yet to consolidate and standardize.
2. Vendors approach in offering standardized services catalog differs. IBM provides a seperate service fabric for each of the industries, and SAP is still in nascent stage by growing the service repository by working with partners.
3. For a ERP customer, it is not necessary to always go with the same ERP vendor for venturing into SOA. they can still look at other mature EAI vendors like WebMethods/IBM to create the SOA fabric on top of the ERP.