I’ve just attended a webinar panel discussion run by eBizQ about Web 2.0 and SOA.

I found the relationship between the two subjects kinda hard to see, hence I attended the webinar to understand it better. I wasn’t much more convinced afterwards. However, one interesting point was that as we expose more and more services in an enterprise, then users can create their own mashups from a variety of data sources, so I can see this relationship. This has the potential to create chaos as users compose their own ’super-services’ though – with usage of underlying services becoming unpredictable and harder to manage.

Another interesting point made by one of the panelists was that Web 2.0 provides the presentation layer on top of an SOA – and whereas the services of an SOA is the technology part of an enterprise architecture, Web 2.0 provides the ‘human’ part. By this I took it that he meant that users can create their own compositions of other services which are customised for them, and would never be identified as good candidates for reuse and so would never exist otherwise.

A lot of the webinar really focused on web 2.0 and what a good thing it can be for an enterprise, which I agree with. My pride was somewhat hurt though as my question to the panel (asking about productivity concerns with offering Facebook/IM etc inside the enterprise, with users “throwing bananas” at each other rather than working) was thoroughly ridiculed by the panel… :o (