Service oriented architecture (SOA) was one of the hottest topics in enterprise software in 2005, and it is set to continue to generate a huge amount of interest in 2006, as more and more people look to it to help them deliver IT which is more responsive to the needs of business.
Although some industry analysts predict that SOA is soon to become a mainstream proposition, there is still a lot of confusion and misunderstanding in the industry about what SOA is and why it is important.
The more misunderstanding there is, the more opportunities will be missed, and the more challenges and risks will go unmanaged.
Let's start from first principles. But I won't bore you with talk of Soap, WSDL, UDDI or any one of a hundred other acronyms; instead, I want to concentrate on a broader perspective of what the "S" and the "A" in SOA mean.
Both "service" and "architecture" have meaning far beyond the context within which most discussion of SOA is taking place.
The idea of a service is something that is relevant not only to how you build, deploy and integrate application software - the "web services perspective" - it is an opportunity to capture and formalise the way in which IT in general is delivered.
