Currently, technology and IT service suppliers are rushing to rebrand their offerings as SOA, and many would have you believe SOA is the answer to whatever business question is posed. But that's not the case; SOA isn't something you buy--it's a way of doing things. The goal of SOA is to help businesses improve their agility to compete successfully in an ever moving business landscape. SOA is particularly suitable where the most important objectives are to be able to integrate or change things very quickly and flexibly. But it's unclear whether all organizations will succeed in exploiting the full potential of SOA. Only a small percentage actually understand what it can do for them and set themselves up in a way that they can fully benefit from. Some companies will be able to fundamentally change what they do, and others will not. There are three steps on the ladder to SOA success: creating more flexible, interoperable systems; reuse/sharing; and collaborating with business people to define high-level services, how much they will cost and their accessibility.

Learn more about whether SOA is hype or not:
- read the article at Computing

ALSO:
- read this on SOA governance
- this on the four stages of successful SOA
- this on getting started with SOA
- this on getting the most out of SOA
- and this on whether SOA will work in your environment