There's no question that SOA has what Wall Street calls "Mo," meaning "momentum." It's in the trade press, and the business press, and most important in the planning cross-hairs of a lot of CIOs. SOA, which stands for "Service-Oriented Architecture" is just plain hot, but it's also facing a kind of crisis. It's a crisis we've seen before in networking, but still one that may be hard to overcome, and if SOA can't overcome it, the concept may be marginalized. What is SOA anyway? "Service Oriented" sounds a lot like a marketing slogan for a car wash or an airline. The basic notion of SOA, as it was originally devised, was that applications could be structured as a series of "services," or pieces of functionality, that would then be assembled as needed. Visualize a graphical user interface with a piece of CRM (customer resource management), a dab of Excel, and maybe a shot of data mining all mixed in.
