Back in March I wrote that only IBM (IBM) could take an out-and-out obtuse technical concept such as service oriented architecture [SOA] and turn into a business issue. IBM had to overcome two challenges to make it happen.

Most important, technically SOA refers to:

• Layering a 10-year-old service-level-agreement mechanism (“the contract”) inherited from the utilities industry
• On top of the decades-old concepts of set-theory-based object-oriented polymorphism, encapsulation and inheritance
• In a 20-year-old client/server relationship

To some that conduct academic research into SOA, Internet and enterprise service bus [ESB] technologies are also required on the above list to make the architecture truly SOA.