Dave Linthicum, the world-renowned author and consultant in middleware, EAI and SOA, has published a 5-level maturity model for service-oriented architectures on his InfoWorld Real-World SOA blog.
Dave is correct to state that having an enterprise-service bus (ESB) is only the first step towards SOA maturity (although many vendors and users think otherwise), you also need transformation and routing (level 2), a common directory service (level 3), brokering (level 4) and orchestration (level 5).
Important to say is that many companies do not need a fully mature SOA to solve their problems. If you can get away with sending SOAP messages from one system (or company) to another (a level 0 SOA), you will save yourself a lot of trouble and money.
Posted by admin at March 2, 2007 09:45 PM