SOA Is Achievable

"Even SOA proponents agree that there's no recent tech breakthroughs that make it a more achievable vision now than it was before . . . "

-- Professor Andrew McAfee

One of the great opportunities I have in my work is having a front row seat on some of the really great technologies as they burst on the scene. I think that is definitely the case with my client GigaSpaces. They have this amazing technology that a lot of Wall Street firms are adopting (but don't want to talk about) that allows them to dynamically scale legacy middleware-based multi-tier environments -- essentially creating SOAs without all the rules and point-to-point connections that most SOA discussions envision.

One of those discussions is taking place right now big time in blogland. A key participant is Harvard's Andrew McAfee who says that SOAs are really just another name for distributed computing, object oriented programming, CORBA, and a bunch of other technologies that have promised plug-and-play software reuse over the years.

Anyway, IMHO I think the whole idea of virtualized deployment may finally make SOA real. Am I missing something here? I'd be interested in hearing from Prof. McAfee or others why things aren't different this time around.