Many of you are probably wondering why or how SOA has become the hottest topic of conversation in IT for the past several years?

The reason why it is at the top of the buzzword list is due to its relationship to integration. The promise of SOA is the possibility of ready-made, largely COTS-deployable integration infrastructures. Like all great ideas, the reality often takes time to catch up to the potential. SOA has not met all of its associated expectations to date due mainly to the fact that it isn't an all encompassing solution (even though many beleive that it is).

More importantly, most enterprises cannot afford to transform their entire infrastructure instantly and the prospect of SOA + legacy architectures is a bit more daunting than creating something new from scratch. There are number of related but distinct technologies that make up the practice of SOA, those include the following areas of specialization:

BPEL - Business Process Execution Language. This represents the business architecture tier for most SOA solutions - process flow logic is captured here and used to 'orchestrate' service execution and compositions.

MDM - Master Data Management. This is a COTS-based solution to coordinating metadata across numerous data source systems. It is especially important within SOA projects to have a strong metadata management backbone behind all other structures.

ESB - Enterprise Service Bus. This is the data transport hub for all SOA message traffic - ESBs have their roots in middleware and EAI solution architectures.

EA - Enterprise Architecture. Most SOA projects are by nature enterprise endeavors, as such often times the SOA architecture ends up becoming the actual EA. Other times though the official EA and the SOA must be reconciled.