I have a friend who is constantly wondering what the "next wave" in the Information Technology industry is going to be. I'm assuming he is waiting for the next big thing to come along that will cause large companies to start a feeding frenzy for talented consultants. This, in turn, would allow the consultants involved to start charging higher hourly rates, as had been the pattern in days passed. I'm not sure if that paradigm is still a valid way of viewing the industry I'm now working in, after the Internet bubble burst, but for the shake of this article I'll continue.

Anyway, I saw this passed week that IBM issued a press release announcing an addition to their Java based WebSphere product line. Computerworld covered this press release pretty well in their article entitled IBM fills out SOA product line. When I first started reading this article I thought to myself blah... blah... blah... yet another company with yet another product release. However, something caught my eye that I'm starting to see more and more of in announcements about SOA. The mention of a Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) , and by such a large player as IBM, means to me that this is more then just a concept or something niche players in the industry are trying to get their heads around. The nutshell version of what an ESB represents is that it is the glue that binds the services or SOA together. That glue or categorization of services is the piece that I couldn't see before when I thought about how to implement SOA within an organization.

So now three key ingredients exist to make the implementation of SOA possible. First, there is the basis of it all in the services themselves. Web Services are implemented with open standards that allow everything to be exposed and consumed fairly easily. Second, is the architectural concept of SOA itself that shows everyone the path to integration and consolidation nirvana. Lastly, the addition of ESB that binds and categorizes all of these different services that will be floating around in an organization as the proverbial glue to holds things together. These three things round out the push to SOA.

I'm not sure if this is the "next wave" my friend is looking for but if such a thing still exists I think this might be it. All the pieces are in place for something very interesting to take place in the coming years. What is needed now is the organizations that need such an integration and consolidation process to take place to start implementing SOA aggressively. However, this "Tipping Point" has not yet been reached, but if more big companies like IBM keep up the drumbeat there is no telling how far this could go.