Why is it that though the industry pundits and experts describe SOA based solutions as more lightweight and distributed, that the vendors are continuing to push out hubs (large stacks, containers, etc.) to their customers? Why is it that customers are still buying hubs?
Is it because the so-called experts are wrong and the customers understand the problem better? Perhaps an academically sound approach just isn't needed in the real world and hubs will do just fine, thank you very much. (I believe there is a class of user this just can't scale too).
Is it because buyers are just plain uneducated or ignorant? I've come across many of these over the years. And I've come across system integrators that build out poor designs tha make distributed architectures look bad.
Is it because customers don't care? They're so burned out buying infrastructure that they've given up the fight? Let's face it they've gone through RPC, DCOM, CORBA, J2EE, .Net etc. and now they're faced with ESBs, JBI, SCA, WCF .....
Is it because hubs can make good sense for small to medium sized businesses and people can't differentiate between a small/medium sized problem and a big problem? The solutions must be different to scale and take care of issues such as transactions and other enterprise features. But, perhaps, it's just seems easier with a hub.
Is it because of perceived benefits of a hub like management? This is of course only a perception problem there are many technologies out there that allow for central management of a distributed architecture.
Hubs seem to have gravity and people get attracted to them. Unfortunately hubs can turn into black holes. Sucking in all that surrounds it into a dense mass from which nothing can escape.
Of course many customers are getting sick of hub based approaches and are not buying. They have enough infrastructure and plenty of hubs. Now they want to leverage that existing asset while a the same time taking advantage of SOA.
IP Babble is the personal blog of William Henry.
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