Wrong, wrong, wrong! Service-oriented integration is definitely NOT the same thing as using Web services, or, God forbid, an ESB for integration.

That’s more or less what a recent ZapThink column is saying this week, responding to this year’s on-and-off again discussion about service-oriented integration. But to be fair, from ZapThink’s perspective, everybody else is just now following up a discussion they first started seven years ago.

Why would you, a busy IT Business Edge reader, revisit this somewhat pedantic issue of SOA and SOI?

To be honest, I get a little sick just thinking about it, too, but, like Paul Harvey, ZapThink has “the rest of the story.” And if we’re all going to make informed decisions about SOA and its potential for saving your company time and money on integration — you need to know the full story. Bottom line: We’ve both got a duty to follow through.

The facts, according to ZapThink, are these:

First, a minor correction, but with a significant point: ZapThink — not Anne Thomas Manes, as I had believed – first introduced the phrase service-oriented integration. They coined the term in 2002 — as a means of — and here’s the key point — differentiating integration by loosely coupled services from Web services adapters. It’s also different from using an ESB for integration.

In fact, they see SOI as requiring a service-oriented architecture:

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