For the same reason that political parties hold their rallies around this time of year (squeezing them in between the end of the holiday season and the start of the Christmas wind-down), this is also the peak time of year for vendors to hold their user conferences,and to brief analysts on their past successes and future strategies.

Having been briefed by a significant number of SOA technology vendors, it is apparent that there is a remarkable consistency in the messages now being sent to the market: if you want to do SOA (and the implicit assumption here is that everyone wants to do SOA), then you need to decide how you are going to implement governance over the SOA implementation in your organization.