But, against the backdrop of all this hype, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink warns that users should not be blinded by all the SOA spiel. “There’s a dirty little secret of SOA,” he says. “Most companies don’t need to buy that much more software to do it.”

Bloomberg believes that, in many cases, users can rely on their existing middleware deployments to develop an SOA environment. “SOA is architecture; it’s a set of best practices,” he says. “You can get that pretty much in any middleware that you already have.”

But users may need new software for more specialist tasks such as metadata management, services management, process management, and identity and access management, he adds.

The other major challenge users face as they roll out their SOA infrastructures is cultural, rather than technological, according to Bloomberg. “What you need for this to work is discipline.” This could mean, for example, working out which parts of the business own which parts of the project and addressing funding issues, he adds.

Read more at: Light Reading – Next Gen Data Center Forum