There’s a lot of talk about SOA and WOA led by ZDNet Blogger, Analyst and great guy Dana Gardner.

WOA is a very fast paced “Web 2.0-ish” way to innovate and mash up concepts quickly. And the massive power of it is that you are standing on the shoulders of Giants who have built “Social Utilities” and amazing Web-Oriented APIs so that you can use astonishingly simple expressions and get vasty goodness (technical term) very easily.

The article states…

WOA has evolved via massive scale trial-and-error, and so has been designed through viral adoption, user pull, self-help and with self-qualification of real-time productivity in mind. It works because it just works, not because it’s supposed to work, or because someday it will work. As Dion says, “And these new models intrinsically take advantage of the important properties of the Web that have made it the most successful network in history.”

It really is a phenomenal quick start to value and a great way to interconnect people to one another. This is a way to extend brand, compete, offer new applications, listen to events on the network, offer compelling new user experiences, participate in “long tail” economics, and just plain try out a million things cheaply.

In fact, the key idea of letting a thousand or million flowers bloom on the “platform” and let nature select the winners was the theme of my SOA World Keynote.

The interesting challenge for the Enterprise is how can the core components that generate the majority of revenue for the enterprise be successfully deployed as a platform? It’s one thing to take advantage of everyone else’s platform out on the internet and it’s a completely different thing to offer platform services of your own.

The experience of being a consumer of services is very snappy and cool and you can use this WOA experience to show value quickly and mash up some amazing things. You can leverage the massive power (and in many cases free hosting, viral application distribution, and software services) of Web Oriented platforms that are offered and for the most part freely available to anyone with markup skills and maybe a scripting language like Ruby Python PHP and JavaScript.

So go kick some butt on WOA. It will do you a world of good. But keep in mind that having something of value to offer the Internet and distributing those services (whether freely or not) enables you to add value to your customers and your entire value ecosystem. By offering your own business services on the network, you can encourage all of the innovation in your ecosystem to build on top of *your* enterprise platform in a wild and open way… and let the laws of nature select which ones will be successful for you.

This will give you the “Peacock’s tail”, which is sort of a tail made up of a lot of tail feathers. You’ll find that having many many customers and many many different ways to serve them is going to make your offerings compelling, sticky and value adding.

My 2 cents,

Miko