Mike Kavis wrote an interesting blog entry that explains why SOA is not just a technology to leverage legacy applications , but it's also good for startups. This got me thinking about how vendors could make it easier for startups or existing small businesses to begin the journey into SOA. Right now, most SOA products are developer tools, governance and other management tools, and back-end products such as application servers. There are few, if any, off-the-shelf services anyone can buy, install and start using with minimal customization. It's hard to tell from the marketing-speak whether such products exist, and where they may exist; they seem to target things like CRM for large organizations. [ Get expert SOA insights from InfoWorld's Real World SOA blog . ] There could be a good market for off-the-shelf SOA components. Maybe not today, since SOA is only just beginning to see significant success and adoption, but soon. One of the nice things about SOA (or about any good component-based architecture) is that you can create a service that is a superset of what most people need. Design it right, and it automatically adapts to the subset of data and functions any given customer may need. Here's an example. Imagine a small chain of DVD rental stores. The business decides to run a central server to track the rentals from all the stores. Normally, the chain would adopt a complete system and adapt their business practices to it, or they ...
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