Enterprises trying to improve business unit productivity and the reuse of IT assets continue to struggle. IT organizations have achieved some success by attacking these challenges with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but in most cases have still only exposed small portions of the overall IT service portfolio. Much of this struggle has been to deliver a "just enough" SOA to the business unit to improve its ability to build applications and features to get to market faster, better, and cheaper. And as we've learned, accomplishing this is easier said than done.

The fact is that SOA is middleware - and middleware traditionally relies on more middleware to translate data into a consumer-friendly state. It's certainly a major disappointment when you finally get your SOA right only to find that building a composite application requires using a portal (middleware) and/or orchestrating it with a BPEL engine (even more middleware). Worse yet, you may be in an organization that deploys a UDDI registry and registers a bunch of Web services. Unfortunately, in most cases there are very few applications built to actually consume these services. How can this be?