Lessons Learned

As with all implementations, there are lessons learned. Luddy warned that he drank some of the cool aid from the SOA hype machine that said that with SOA based products, everything will be easy. What he came to realize is, once SOA is implemented, integration to other SOA services is only easier than non-SOA, or legacy, software. While it took less than one week to implement bi-directional ITIL incident management with Salesforce.com cases, integrating with HP Openview or Tivoli Enterprise Console required that Service-now.com first create a SOA layer on top of the legacy code before being able to move forward with the integration.

Luddy used a combination of young and experienced staffers claiming that a young mindset is required. More experienced developers can tend to be set in their ways which may have been good ideas in the past, but are not good ideas today. For example, Luddy asks "why would anyone write APIs" anymore? APIs made sense back in the client server days but is not the most efficient approach in an SOA. Luddy challenged his more experienced developers to go with what is relevant to the problems you are trying to solve today and "shed your baggage at the door." Luddy's best advice is "choose the simplest, most flexible technologies." His team did just that and selected a variety of open source and web 2.0 technologies to make the user presentation layer as user friendly and customizable as possible.

Summary

As Service-now.com has proven, SOA is not just for legacy system integration. In reality, SOA is actually easier to implement for startups then for companies that have been around a while. Starting with a clean slate and building SOA properly from the ground up can give a company huge competitive advantages over competition that is bogged down with legacy applications and outdated business processes. It is also much easier to start with SOA then to build it in later.