While it is widely understood that SOA involves tools, integration, web services technologies and process modelling, it may not be so obvious what new investment is needed for a successful strategic SOA deployment.

Know your requirements

"A lot of people know what they want from SOA - speed of change, integration, turning IT into a service for the business - but they do not actually know what SOA is," says Neil Ward-Dutton, research director at specialist IT advisory firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton.

According to Ward-Dutton, this lack of clarity could make it difficult to make sense of a market where, "if Gartner says an enterprise service bus (ESB) is a key SOA technology, suddenly every supplier has one".

All the major integration and middleware companies have updated their portfolios in the past few years to include some form of SOA technology at a very high level, says Ward-Dutton.