Last week I was off the grid enjoying the time-honored tradition of Spring Break with my two school-age kids.  As typical for this time of year, the weather was anything but spring like, as we enjoyed a few days of blustery winds, sub-freezing temps and snowball fights followed by a few days of record-breaking 90+ degree heat.   

Ah, spring, it almost feels like the state of SOA.SOA had a good week last week, however.  While SOA was declared as dead in January, it has become the IT architecture phoenix of late and is now being described as headed to the preverbal plateau of productivity.  This is good news for IT in that we can cut the marketing hype, acknowledge that SOA is well established and now get to the important heavy lifting of making it work. 

With that in mind, here are a couple of highlights from last week's SOA industry musings:Loraine Lawson writing for IT Business Edge shares the following:

"It's the perfect rites-of-spring story, really. You may recall the Burton Group declared SOA officially dead in the thick of winter. But just four months later, a different analyst firm - Gartner - says SOA is climbing out of the negative "trough of disillusionment" into the "slope of enlightenment" on the hype cycle.  Translated out of the original analyst-ese, that means mainstream companies and agencies are adopting SOA and even finding it useful."

Gartner Group, on April 3rd, adds a key point as to why SOA is experiencing healthy adoption as of late in an ihotdesk article:

"Jess Thompson, research vice president at Gartner, says the increasing popularity and adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS), business process management and cloud computing has helped to sustain the appeal of SOA.""Furthermore, some SOA initiatives already underway are being accelerated because users want to experience the benefits of SOA sooner rather than later," he suggests.

Finally, picking up on the tsunami-like interest in Cloud computing these days, David Linthicum in an April 16th blog echoes a key theme about the importance of what we've learned from SOA to successfully adopting cloud-the importance of best practices from SOA Governance to cloud computing.

David states:  "Governance as related to service is most applicable to the use of cloud computing since we are basically defining our architecture as a set of services that are relocatable between on-premise and cloud computing-based systems.  SOA is the approach here, and thus SOA or service governance is the approach and the technology we'll leverage to manage service within the enterprise and cloud."

You may recall HP's Director of SOA Governance Center, Tim Hall, podcasting with Dana Gardner on the same topic back in November 2008 in a podcast titled:  "Tim Hall on the Heightened Role of Governance and Cloud Computing."  You can listen to the podcast  here:  

The point of all this is that, like spring, good architecture can survive the winter trough of disillusionment and rise up to deliver it's promise for those who want to roll up their sleeves and make it work.  Just like a spring vegetable garden, you need to actively govern the SOA effort to weed out the bad implementations and keep a handle on the cultural and political bugs who may try to destroy the effort.  Good governance and a pragmatic focus will bear SOA fruit.