Obviously that's not the whole ball of wax that is service-oriented architecture, but it does identify the two most pressing initiatives inside SOA development.
For this entire decade, IT shops have recognized they've got an integration problem. We talk a lot about loose coupling, interoperability and modularity these days, but it all gets back to building integrated services, or at least services that can be integrated. There's a lot to talk about far flung topics in the SOA universe and sometimes simple messages can get lost in the shuffle.
