Insurance company IT people began kicking around the phrase "service-oriented architecture" at least four or five years ago. For short, some call it by the two-syllable name "soa," while others prefer to spell out the letters "S-O-A."

However it's pronounced, SOA refers to a way of thinking nearly as old as computing itself and bound to remain relevant far into the future. It's all about creating services that save time and money because applications developers can re-use them-often on mainframes.

As with so many IT concepts, the term SOA has many meanings and is often defined to fit the needs of a product someone is trying to sell, says Stephen Korow, vice president of technology at Decision Research Corp., a Honolulu-based software vendor.