The SOA landscape is not all that clear, says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC who scopes this stuff out for a living. He uses words like "muddled" and "confused" when talking about some standards and product offerings. But looking on the bright side, at least he doesn't use the word "chaotic."
So take heart, you may not be confused sort so much as you are looking at a confusing picture.
Bloomberg points out that it isn't the analyst's job to clarify the SOA picture. The architects, standards bodies and vendors will have to do that themselves, eventually. In the meantime, he's written a white paper, "Making Sense of SOA Governance, Service Lifecycle Management, Registries & Repositories" to provide an overview of where things stand now, muddled as some aspects may be.
