Like new and revolutionary computing architectures that came before it, SOA is the wonder tonic that promises to cure IT's troubles, once and for all. Or at least that's what the vendors say. The problem is, with everybody and his grandmother now riding the SOA bandwagon, the wagon is losing its identity and direction.

In its purest form, SOA refers to a framework for allowing distributed applications to communicate with each other with less dependency and "looser coupling" than previous integration technologies and techniques allowed. To work in a SOA, applications must be "service enabled," which is generally understood to mean that the applications themselves are Web services and conform to the various Web services specifications (XML, WSDL, SOAP, Etc.). SOA assets are generally freed from their monolithic hosts, such as iSeries servers, using technology "wrappers" that come in two flavors: Microsoft .NET and Sun Microsystems Java.