Hi Sam,

Thanks for the insight. I think that SOA is an opportunity for vendors to build re-usable software services into products which then can be composed/customized/etc. for customers and hence fit better into their Service Oriented Enterprise and it will give vendors the opportunity to diversify, i.e. make different products, for different markets and use techniques from Software Product Lines (http://www.lero.ie/splc2008/home.html). In effect the way SAP seems to do it with their Enterprise Service Bundles. I have been talking to people from the IT side in the Insurance business but they are stating that the products they buy are not SOA, so already they are the legacy assets of the future? Other then SAP is anybody building software products based on the architectural principles of a SOA?

I do not see SOA as a technology. It is architecture. The CIO could see it as an opportunity to get more control over the IT in the enterprise which is suppose to help the CIO to deliver on the overall business goals of the enterprise. The CIO will be able to reason better about the enterprise architecture and hence is able to better focus on what is core to the business and what is context (Moore, Living on the Fault Line). Do you see this happening? SOA, or better Enterprise SOA should be a business initiative rather then an IT one.

You made a statement there about 2 clients starting the SOA journey using it as integration? In that case SOA is nothing more then technology are are they really transforming their business into services and use SOA to align it with the IT, a first step being a wrap and reuse of legacy assets? Is it a bottom up approach or top down?

Richard