There is a wide range of views of SOA. Some people regard it as primarily a software design paradigm, driven by a handful of large software vendors selling SOA platforms, based on a specific set of technical standards (WS*). Indeed, some people ignore the word "architecture" altogether, and appear to equate SOA with JBOWS - just a bunch of web services.
I have always seen SOA as something more than this - an opportunity to rethink systems (not just software but sociotechnical systems - in other words, including people as well as devices) as loosely coupled networks of business capability. Loose coupling is a business design paradigm as well as a software design paradigm, as I explained in my 2001 book on the Component-Based Business, as well as in many articles for the CBDI Journal.
I am not particularly interested in the technicalities of SOA implementation for its own sake, I am fairly neutral about SOA standards (for example SOAP versus REST), and I am sceptical of some of the wild and optimistic claims of some of the SOA champions and vendors. However, I remain interested in innovative ways of solving real business problems with this kind of technology.
For more on my view of SOA, please read the following posts.
- SOA Retrospective (June 2009)
- Ecosystem SOA (October 2009)
