RedMonk captures Adobe-SAP SOA story

While many of us tech-heads have lived in ServiceLand for years, the mainstream media and analyst communities have not fully understood the true benefits. RedMonk, the analyst firm out of the UK, is IMO one of the first to really put the pieces of the Web 2.0 + SOA for the enterprise together. In one of his latest posts, James Governor writes:

Adobe is particularly notable from an enterprise pace layering perspective because unlike many other technologies that fall under the heading Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Adobe has focused on delivering service oriented front ends that can be integrated with back end services with a minimum of fuss and code. This is loose coupling - of distributed components.

James observes that we at Adobe have had trouble communicating well in the past. We are an enterprise software vendor and we have a very mature SOA story. LiveCycle ES is a textbook example of SOA in action when deployed with SAP systems.

During SAP CEO Leo Apotheker’s keynote on Tuesday morning at TechEd 2008 he introduced a new concept called Timeless Software. In fact, this expression itself is timeless as noted by Christopher Alexander in "The Timeless Way of Building". Regardless of the changes in technologies and user interface designs, the separation of concerns (a pattern often noted as MVC) has been taken a step further. This is a pattern worth noting for the upcoming Web 2.0 Design Patterns book.

Kudos to Leo for explaining this and kudos to James for translating it so mere mortals can understand the immense value of this timeless way of building.