Many in the media are already calling on the demise of SOA and saying that it's just a passing phase, or it's really just a rebrand of the EAI space, or that it will be segmented only to certain integration-type challenges.

We have a bit of a different take. The term SOA will go away over the next several years but it will go the same route that e-commerce applications went.

If you think back to the mid-'90s, we started talking about e-commerce as an architecture that was distinct from the then traditional enterprise architecture. However, over the past few years, e-commerce as a term has disappeared because it has become the ubiquitous expectation for how we build applications, or what those applications do (some kind of commerce). It consumed the entire enterprise application space.