Call it a kind of best-of-breed approach to building rich applications: Take one useful part of this application, good parts of another, and build a super composite that zips across the Web. Then use it again.

IBM, however, explains its latest service oriented architecture (SOA) products and service offerings a bit differently. The tech bellwether's global business services division just launched what it calls new, industry-focused software and services that help customers in key verticals build applications geared for the Internet age.

That means applications that can pull just the right amount of data -- or scale up for more functions when necessary.

The new products are a mix of consulting and software packages that range from basic process review to wholesale database changes in order to deploy SOA-based applications. They come in the form of "fabrics" -- parts of the best applications in order to build composite applications for a service oriented architecture (define).