Distinguishing between data and apps for SOA

One of the biggest challenges that Services Oriented Architectures pose for enterprise architects is managing the behavior of data and applications as they mix and match across the servers and virtual machines of next generation infrastructures. Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink, an SOA market research firm, tells InformationWeek that when a set of applications performs functions isolated as an independent service, the results can look a lot like data as they're passed off to another application. Likewise, a query to a service that triggers a stored procedure in the database yields results that look a lot like an outcome of application logic. In services, data ceases to exist as something distinct from the application logic. 

For more on how enterprises are keeping track of apps and data:
- check out this InformationWeek article