I published a link to my post "Choosing a SOA Consultant" in Ulitzer.

Ulitzer is a "new media" site.

The site provides a portal like page for every author. You can look at my page as an example.

Each article's page includes related articles. For example "Choosing a SOA Consultant" page includes the article Anatomy of a Cloud Consultant - What Defines A "Cloud Expert?, written by Reuven Cohen, a leading Cloud Computing expert.

The interesting article demonstrates deep understanding of Cloud Computing and I do agree with most of the ideas expressed in it.

However, I have different opinion on some issues as described in the following paragraph.

"You are only as good as your last job"

In my opinion you are as good as your experience and capabilities and not as your last job.

A consultant is not a CXO (CEO, CTO etc.) who makes the decisions and is also responsible for performing the projects derived from the decisions.

Many years ago when I was a CTO I was responsible for technological decisions, especially for the unusual decisions i.e. not choosing IBM's or Microsoft's products.

Fortunately, my unusual products selection decisions  turned to be better products for less money decisions.

Many times customers' decisions were opposite to my advice as consultant.

For example, one of my customers choose a Workflow product which I thought will disappear from the market in few years (I was not an expert in Workflow but after talking to experts and reading Research Notes I understood why there is no future to that product). I wonder if anybody remembered three years later when the vendor stopped supporting the product, that I warned the client not to base its solutions on that product.

As far as SOA is concerned, I am aware of companies failing in their SOA initiatives executed wrongly, despite of totally different approach recommended by me or by another expert.

Even an integrator is not as good as its last project is. As a consultant for a large Core Banking endeavor, I evaluated integrator's bids. I wondered why Accenture failed in a similar project in a European bank. According to someone neutral (not employed by the bank and not employed by Accenture), who was involved deeply in that endeavor "The endeavor was a moving target. It is not Accenture's fault that it failed".   

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