The growing interest in the revitalized SOA enabled by Web services has created a rush of interest from technology providers eager to cast themselves as “SOA providers.” In reality, the latest products–essentially the latest generation of middleware and development tools–are still relatively immature. But marketing from large vendors is beginning to raise awareness, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at research company ZapThink.

“There’s still a lot more make-up than substance (from vendors), but that doesn’t matter,” said Schmelzer, who reported seeing an uptick in interest in SOAs from potential customers. “(Corporate) developers are saying, ‘Loosely coupled systems and standards-based computing–I like that idea…So it’s got a lot of people thinking about it.’”

For all the promise, though, creating shared software services in a company is a significant shift. To promote reusable services across a business, companies need to shed the ingrained notion that one person or department “owns” a specific application or data source, cautioned Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink. On top of cultural changes, technical architects and designers need to carefully consider how to structure their business as a set of discrete services, experts said.

“Usually the first SOA project brings a reasonable improvement in integration, but subsequent projects will realize a better return on investment as companies reuse services,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: CNet