Depending on who you talk to, Service Orientation is either the biggest disruptive innovation in software, or merely a rerun of object-oriented programming and development. Mega-vendors IBM, Oracle and SAP -- among others -- are spending billions to promote Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the way forward for businesses struggling to create more flexible, agile business processes while reducing the cost of application development and management. Given all the “noise” in the market about SOA, we determined that it was time to find out what users are really doing with SOA -- hence we set out to interview over forty senior IT executives to find out what they are -- and are not -- doing with SOA. Hence the title of this report -- a “SOA Reality Check.”
