That's not surprising, I guess, since every new computing trend generates debate and every vendor tries to promote their technology as the right technology – the right product – that will allow customers to take the most advantage of a new approach. It's a scramble as vendors try to aggressively reposition their existing product suites to take advantage of customer interest in a hot IT trend. It's unfortunate, though, because this behavior often creates a lot of confusion and potential disillusionment, as promises made often do not turn into promises kept and technology solutions sold as appropriate for SOA may turn out not to be.
To set the right perspective on this, it's important to note that SOA is, by definition, distributed. The purpose of a service is to communicate remotely with another service, typically to share data. The purpose of an SOA is to change the approach of IT from building bespoke, monolithic applications to building applications that are developed and integrated more and more using assets from a collection of shared, reusable functionality, i.e. services.
