There have been some recent announcements that highlight some of the directions that SOA (service oriented architecture) tools are taking, most of them devoted toward integration. However, some of the tools are also looking more at the development stage of how to create services and then join up services, perhaps in some sort of event processing.

It makes sense for architects and developers and even business analysts to start devoting logic of process to the ESB (enterprise service bus) and let the plumbing take care of itself, vis-à-vis standards and module connectors.