In that context: Is SOA an upcoming reality or rather a dream that will never come true?
Colony: Good question. If I took all 400 Forrester analysts and line them up against the wall and ask them what is SOA? You will get 300 answers. But I will give you my very simple answer: SOA is a new way to write software. That’s all it is. But what’s cool about it is that we now have a standard architecture for software. So that I can write an element of software from my systems and than take it and embed it into my customers’ systems. So that now I can connect my systems to those of my customers very, very easily using SOA. And I can than deliver services to my customer using the standard architecture. That is a huge breakthrough. Indeed we dreamed about this for 30 years. And the idea of services is the future of all businesses.
If I am General Electric I am not just selling engines to Lufthansa. Once Lufthansa buys the jet engines me as GE want to help Lufthansa maintain them, deliver spare parts, train, repair etc. And to do that I want it part of my systems to be embedded into those of Lufthansa. So that when an engine is beginning to fail I now that and can provide for the mechanics at Frankfurt Airport when that jet arrives. This is why I believe that SOA is key to future business models. Which means everyone is in the services business. The key issue is the standards like xml. Look at the web for example. The web gave us a standard transport layer. In the old days there was no such standard. That also constitutes a great challenge to Microsoft. Software today is not just on shiny disks for 300 Dollars but available via the internet.
Do you believe that there is going to be something like licensed software in the future considering that concepts like SaaS getting more and more popular?
Colony: SaaS is a very rudimentary and crude way to do software – because the web is very crude. Essentially the web today has 97 percent of the processing power on the server and only 3 percent on the client. But that makes no sense because the client is becoming evermore intelligent. So, I believe that the web is a dead technology – it will be replaced by a new technology running on the internet where the executables will be running at the server but also at the clients. And there is the ability to move the executables very freely and to run them at the server and the client synchronized. That is what we call interactive computing or executable internet. So SaaS I think is a short term bridge to the executable internet world.
In fact you already see this: Google earth is this, Google maps is this. Google is the company which is driving the executable internet and understands that. And that is big trouble for Microsoft. In a way executable internet really is SOA done right. And that will be very BT oriented.
