A spotlight is brightly focused on SOA. Why is there is so much heat in the whole SOA and middleware space at the moment? The reason is simple but profound: We are going through a major change in design centers!
For most of the last 30 years, applications have dominated the design center. The industry architected solutions around applications; some even architected business processes around applications. Applications have been the center of the software universe and everything has revolved around them. However, with the advent of the Internet and then the Web Service standards, a whole new thinking is starting to pervade. The radical thought is Copernican in nature. Applications are in fact just planets in a solar system. The real design center is the network and applications revolve around it.
