Kriens: SOA next big thing for IT spending

NEW YORK ? It was the PC in the 1980s and Windows in the 1990s that led to record spending on technology and boom times for IT companies. Now, service-oriented architecture is looking like the next big growth driver, Juniper Network Inc.'s Chairman and CEO Scott Kriens said Tuesday in a keynote speech at the Interop New York trade show.

IT has evolved from the client-server environment to the Web-based world to today where things have evolved clientless, Kriens said. Now, enterprises are looking to get to where people, devices, machines and information all talk to each other seamlessly.

"We are trying to create a world where everything talks to everything, which is kind of like saying, 'Can't we all get along?' " Kriens said. "But the problem ? and why the search for what's real is so important ? is [that finding a solution is] not that simple."

Service-oriented architecture is one thing that will lead IT to that goal, Kriens said, comparing SOA to Web 2.0, in that, at some point, the label becomes meaningless, because it covers everything.

"We all know about the evolution of the [local area network]. As there became more of those, the [wide area network] became one of the next big things," Kriens said. Then came the Internet and the evolution of the IP infrastructure.

Today, the want is for "more than just an IP infrastructure or an Internet," he said. "We've got applications out there, and what we'd really like to do is tie those all together. And when we tie that all together, we get the online, real-time enterprise, [and that] is part of what makes this seamless reality among machines and people and devices and information happen."

Opportunity should be an offshoot of that goal. Citing data from Gartner Inc., Kriens said that 80 percent of new development projects will be provided through the basis of SOA by 2008. And by 2010, 80 percent of the application and software revenue growth will be from SOA, and SOA-related spending will be $11 billion.