SOA adoption down from 2006 - Are you surprised?

Not me. Having read the story and a very valid perspective from Joe McKendrick . I think a point that got missed is that : wasn't this expected?

To me it was. The reason at a macro level is that time and again we have seen that "Information Technology Industry " is the definition of a cyclical industry. Just when you thought that Rational Unified Process was the silver bullet for software development , Agile methodologies came about and challenged RUP. Just when you thought that the only way to build high performance websites was by purchasing high-end Unix servers , Horizontal scalability avatar was realized via google and showed that you can put together a ton of small PC's and run a web-scale application like that of google's(note that this might change again with red-shift).

The problem in IT and business is that just about the time when you can solve a problem , it actually moves elsewhere. SOA came into existence when the mantra for doing business shifted from "Think Globally and Act Locally" to "Think Globally and execute globally" . So executing globally required lot of governance , control and to some - excessive redtape. It lead to the creation of a new position in the IT organization - VP shared services , responsible for managing all shared assets by the organization.

Now the Mantra for business seems to be "Think Globally , execute globally and Collaborate Globally" - By collaborate globally I am referring to Crowd sourcing and open source techniques. The collaborate aspect changes the IT organization structure yet again. Instead of having a business head for "shared services" whose aim in life was to own everything common used in the Enterprise , The Lines of businesses now have the option to use crowd sourcing techniques and leverage SaaS type solutions to achieve their goals. When they do that there obviously will not be any synergies between the styles of consumption of services but clearly there will be a lot of JBOWS (Just a bunch of services) . As a result in my opinion the SOA concept of coming up with a master API that will be used by everyone is failing.