If you answered yes to any of the above then you have officially fallen victim to some of the most prevalent myths about SOA. Don't feel too bad, though, because you're not alone. In fact, leaders in both business and IT are subscribing to many of the same beliefs about SOA. Unfortunately, many of these beliefs are misguided.
You'll want to get your facts straight now because analysts and industry leaders all agree that SOA is the single most important IT initiative in the last decade.
Myth #1:
SOA is a technology.
Reality:
SOA is an architectural concept. It is the way companies weave applications and processes together in a flexible manner so that they can reuse them. Think of SOA as a software-development style that allows applications to be assembled from reusable components instead of being built from scratch.
If "regular" coding resembles building a house, SOA is like putting a pre-fabricated house together in the sense that the pre-built pieces just have to be connected. A more technical definition might be that SOA is a collection of services that communicate with each other through standard interfaces. The services are self-contained and do not depend on the context or state of the other services, and they work within a distributed systems architecture.
