SOA has been aggressively hyped by the IT industry as a technology that can - and does - change the very nature of business. In recent times - as you well know - the Internet was a similar technology - and as with the Internet, we at IBM actually believe the hype to be true.

SOA has come on the scene in a big way in the past few years. But hype alone isn't what's causing the huge stir. It's because those who've started using SOA have discovered a huge benefit: flexibility. Let me put it this way: Before SOA, to have flexibility, a company might have needed to deploy and integrate 20 different software applications. After SOA, it mightn't need to build 20 isolated applications but only one instead - which, on a dime (both literally and figuratively), it can reconfigure 20 different ways to meet the imperatives of changing market conditions. That's flexibility.