For many companies, the move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can yield substantial rewards, including reduced operating costs and better customer service. But those benefits only show up after companies work through thorny problems like obtaining executive buy-in, shifting the way development groups operate and hammering out sometimes contentious new business rules, according to users at The Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference here.

At Marriott International Inc., for example, SOA has been identified as one of the corporation's three strategic technology platforms, along with business intelligence and commercial off-the-shelf software, said John Whitridge, Marriott's vice president of enterprise architecture. The Bethesda, Md.-based company has tapped SOA to help shorten development times and pull more value from legacy systems.