SOA is the latest cure-all in a long line of strategic IT visions that began with complex object frameworks, moved on to touchy client/server systems, followed by simple three-tier architectures, and ended up in a tangle of distributed computing.
Today, most big organisations run bits of them all, while evaluating or trying to get started on installing the latest architectural fashion that is SOA.
With its Lego-like approach to snapping together reusable information service modules, SOA promises at least as much as all the other enterprise architecture fashion trends, but Michael Barnes, a vice-president of Gartner Research, says SOA will succeed where others have partly failed because it directly targets real business value instead of ever-changing technology trends.
