The emphasis on integration “illustrates how far we’ve gotten from the original understanding of what SOA is,” said Ronald Schmelzer, managing partner at analyst firm ZapThink LLC in Baltimore. “It reflects the fact that 90%-plus of people thinking they’re doing SOA are really doing Web services/enterprise application integration.

“They just got rid of the adapters,” Schmelzer continued. But, he asserted, “SOA has to be an architectural approach.

He traces this situation to vendor marketing. “I think we can squarely blame the vendors for this,” he said. “They say ‘if you want to do SOA, buy our product.’ That’s a complete fallacy.”

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