SOA, what happens when your service provider goes out of business?

As we move toward SOA based approaches, we face an interesting dilema. What happens when your service provider goes out of business (or when they kill a product line, or say, like MS tends to say after a few years “upgrade now or die“)? Unlike a software company whose components you have purchased going out of business, this could be potentially devastating to your application's infrastructure. How will you deal with this situation? Does your SLA cover you? Is this outside the scope of a SLA? I have a feeling this may become a hot topic as we move toward service oriented architectures. One major side-effect of this dilema may be the creation of serious barriers to entry for smaller software companies (which have a hard enough time with large licensing deals when they are shipping binaries).

4 Comments

  • Jesse - I think its a valid point - however many have been dealing with those issues for years. While SOA is getting a lot of buzz right now - the concept is not new just repackaged. From SLA to contracts those issues are ironed out with your service provider if you are of the level where it matters.



    Just as some get 2 hour turnaround on support others will get 24-48 hours- some will just get a sorry charllie via e-mail - either way if you depend on a service - make sure you have a plan for when it does not work!

  • I think Dave, Mr. Dave, is right. Things like the level of service, support, availability, and max response time are contractual issues. You may monitor these things programmatically, but you need it in writing.

  • And more than just in writing ... if the loss of service provider will severly impact your app, you need to at least attempt to quantify the value of their system to you .... then incorporate that valuation or value metric into your SLA.

  • That is the simplest answer, but it doesn't work for large scale scenarios in which access to large amounts of data is the key service being provided (MapQuest, Passport, etc.). Not to mention that most companies don't would rather leave the option of selling their IP open.

Comments have been disabled for this content.