Service-oriented architecture, or SOA for short, is the latest to emerge from the fog of vendor publicity and media attention. But — dare we say it — this may be different and there are glimpses of substance behind the smoke.
This could be due in part to the fact that SOA is not a pure technology product. Instead, as its name suggests, it’s an architecture: a series of processes with the tantalising promise of bringing IT into closer alignment with business. Its current popularity probably owes something to the fact that it dovetails with the current thinking in IT which tries to position technology as a strategic enabler to the business.
