Annrai the CEO of Cape Clear has a post up highlighting that SOA needs to be looked at from a business user perspective and not only from a technically point of view to avoid it from going down the route of many such TLA's that are now buried and gone. Here is an excerpt from the post:

So if I stand up to a business user and say "SOA enables more agile applications," her eyes might glaze over. However, to borrow from Scott McNealy who many years ago coined the phrase "the network is the computer," I think we could now claim that "SOA *IS* your new business application." This claim might cause our business user to pay a little more attention. She might begin to ask the questions that help us as vendors let the industry know why this revolution in IT is fundamentally changing the business applications world.

Some key inputs from the post 1. Currently focussed on the techies and not on the business user.
2. Current selling point for SOA - Make application more agile & Enable easier intergration
3. SaaS and SOA as one of the main drivers in pushing forward the SOA adoption
4. Many people at Gartner who were thinking that the category should be renamed around the notion of "Business Process Modeling."
5. Gartner is already thinking about SOA more in terms of how it impacts the business application layer than the middleware layer.
6. SOA is the design philosophy that merges the IT infrastructure with business applications
7. ESB and SOA that gave the business users visibility into their own business process (and its failures)!


Prashanth Rai