Service-Oriented Architecture, or SOA is often thought to be a "new idea" conceived around 2000 or so. In reality, I spent my entire career (going back to 1982) working on what is now called SOA, and these concepts really aren't new. This paper chronicles the early history of SOA, an idea that is now at least 25 years old.

This was the paper that got my company, The Cushing Group, Inc. a lot of industry attention, and a backlog of customer interest we never managed to satisfy. Our work at Wells Fargo was the first published case study I am aware of describing how the approach now known as SOA was able to deliver some fantastic benefits to Wells Fargo, including enabling them to become the world's first Internet bank in a record 60-day project cycle. It was written in 1996, and describes work we began at Wells Fargo in 1993.

This article appeared as the cover story in the February 1997 issue of Distributed Object Computing magazine. It's really just a condensed version of the full-length Wells Fargo case study paper I wrote in 1996, which is also available for download from this site.

This white paper was recently published by Oracle (individual author(s) names are not known to me). Reading this made me laugh out loud, as the authors seem to be asserting that these are new ideas. The technique of taking an existing mainframe-hosted legacy application designed around a 3270 character cell human interface and exposing its functional capability as a service in an SOA environment was the basis of my work at Wells Fargo Bank in 1993, so in reality this idea is at least 15 years old. It was reading this article that prompted me to write "The 25-year History of Service Oriented Architecture", which is also available for download on this site.