It seems a fair question after service-oriented architecture (SOA) did not make the Gartner Inc. list of "Top 10 Strategic Technology Areas" release this week, but on his ZDNet blog Joe McKendrick, analyst for Evan Data Corp. offered assurance that SOA is the "behind-the-scenes force" for many in the top 10 including business process modeling, metadata management, mashups and composite apps, and Web platforms.

But after last week's analysts' consensus that an SOA business plan should not even mention SOA, and its failure to make the Gartner list, it seemed fair to ask McKendrick if SOA was becoming an invisible force behind Web 2.0 technologies, but destined to stay a secret among geeks.