Reflecting on his presentation, Johnson said he discussed how economic cycles influence software. "My basic argument was that over the last 10 years, you can pretty much map back the fluctuations in enterprise Java complexity to the economic cycle," he said.

During the dot-com boom period of several years ago, there were high levels of complexity because no one was questioning the added cost, said Johnson. A recession, though, presents the end of enterprise Java complexity, he said.

SOA also has been impacted by the economy, Johnson explained. CIOs had become convinced that they needed to buy something to have an SOA, but now, they are more prone to working with whatever technologies they already have and exposing services to enable interoperability, he said.

"I think a lot of the complex SOA solutions like BEA AquaLogic and the like are becoming significantly less sought-after," he said. , Johnson said the term SOA is going out of fashion.

Buying SOA is being replaced by actually doing SOA, Johnson stressed.