Remember when CRM was the IT buzzword of the 1990s? Companies were implementing CRM, they were leveraging CRM, and they were rolling out CRM to improve customer satisfaction. We knew CRM was most likely a good thing, but did anyone really grasp what it meant when it first appeared? There are so many new IT acronyms continually appearing -- even IT is an acronym! -- that it’s often difficult to keep track of it all, much less understand what each means and has to offer. Such is the case with SOA, which by this time most know stands for “service oriented architecture.” Unlike the term CRM, which was relatively easy to understand because of the words “customer relationship,” SOA is a much fuzzier concept. A service-oriented architecture isn’t just a single thing, but a collection of services that communicate with each other.
