It's been taken more or less as an article of faith that you can't get SOA in a box, and that the vendors who have been trying to package and offer it as such have been fishing for easy money from poorly educated clients who want everything to be easy; plug and play SOA, as it were. I have tended to subscribe to this theory myself, but Jack van hoof points out that, as with many other services that were previously held to be in-house only, some vendors may be finding ways to truly and adequately offer SOA in a box.

I guess I have to say, point taken. I can't think of any theoretical reason, if you are already basically adapted to a single-vendor implementation, that you couldn't just take off-the-shelf SOA and make it work. That's a tenet I often preach to clients in other matters, after all-you are a not a unique and special butterfly, your business processes probably aren't a competitive advantage that you have to mold your information systems around (note: some of them are-but you'd better know the difference before you go mucking around with any of them) and so you can probably go off-the-shelf and save yourself time and money in the process. Custom development is expensive and fraught with risk. And yet I-and others-have been suggesting that it's the only route to viable SOA. Perhaps not.

I think Joel McKendrick gets to the heart of the issue in his post on the concept, however:

But vendor offerings are limited to tools and templates. Good SOA is ultimately the product of enlightened and savvy management, smart and well-trained people, and competitive drive. And that part will never come in a box.

Regardless of where you find the technical side of the solution, the organizational side is always more important and always comes from scratch.