SOA is big, a billion new readers can’t be wrong

SearchSOA.com has gone international. Just recently we launched a version of the site in China. Now, technically speaking, we don’t have a billion new readers on the site, but you get the idea: namely, we’ve launched the site in the most populous nation on the planet.

Apparently a lot of those emerging businesses in China are thinking it might make sense not to build a haphazard and unmanageable application infrastructure. Imagine that? These companies might actually start with a well-conceived reference architecture and adhere to the basic principles of service orientation. They might be employing the best practices covered in our Service Orientation for Architects School inside those pristine greenfields with which they get to work.

It’s actually not the most comforting notion when you get right down to it. You’ve got who knows how many emerging companies looking to run IT as a profit center instead of a cost center. What if they’re agile and you’re not? How many partnerships will you miss out on? How much business will go to someone else? Suddenly the world isn’t as flat as Thomas Friedman theorized. Instead you’re surrounded by mountains to climb in every direction.

It should be fascinating to see how SOA adoption goes in China. Will the Ertan Hydropower’s Yalong River Dam project be the standard over there? If so, then app dev really will have entered a new world order.

Of course, maybe we’ll confuse our Mandarin readers as much as we help them. For instance, when our lead writer Rich Seeley makes a reference to Yogi Berra at the top of a story, it could cause people to think Yogi Berra is some famous IT guru whose wisdom must be sought out … and that could be a big clog in their machine.