Depending on who you talk to, SOA is either the coming thing or a marketing ploy based on an acronym, some technology and little else. In one view, we have organisations running on shared business services, delivering business outcomes and supported by technology that can be insourced, outsourced or upgraded at will, as long as the service contract doesn't change. In the other view, we have standards-based chaos, in which services are built "right" using all the latest acronym-ware—ESB, WS-this, WS-that, Web 2.0—but whether you get the right services, built right, is largely a matter of chance.

As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle and where you are on the continuum depends on both your corporate and SOA maturity. The focus should be on building a service-oriented business and then using service-oriented technology, where appropriate, to support it.