Let's not kid ourselves. The concept of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is nothing new. IT gurus and technical evangelists have been advocating this concept for application development for many years — some say as far back as the 1980s.

"Some people called it component-based development, while others would call it object-orientation. Ultimately the concept is all about breaking down a large program into reusable pieces that span across the network," says Ernest Chen, BEA Systems' senior manager for product marketing in Asia Pacific.

Chen says that although people have previously talked about the SOA concept — for instance, in terms of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard — the challenge then was in overcoming the technicalities of these earlier approaches.