When I talk about SOA, Service Oriented Architecture, most of the time people as well business as developers see this as a huge investment in knowledge and technology.
When talking about the ROI of SOA, I often hear that it’s only a solution for huge companies that can invest in these kinds of technologies.
This means that SOA still isn’t very clear for people and they all tend to have the same question … what’s in it for me, for my company and how much will this cost.
Well first all, SOA isn’t the word to use, it’s all about integration. When you’re talking about data integration, business process integration, application integration, … everything has got to do with the basic principles of a SOA methodology: Loose coupling, re-use, standardization and services.
There’s no such thing as a SOA Architecture, it’s more a new way of thinking, a methodology to guide you through getting acquanted with this new paradigm.
A quote I found very useful (more information regarding the article, can be found on searchsoa):
Today’s SOA projects are largely about integration. The top benefits
organizations hope to achieve are improved data integration (32%), enable legacy
application integration (32%) and integrated disparate department applications
(23%), followed by cost cutting (21%). Staying competitive (8.4%) and driving
innovation (8%) tracked low on the expected benefits list.
More information regarding integration-projects and how to achieve improvement in these different domains will be posted regularly on this blog-post.
iAdvise blog 
When you say “There’s no such thing as a SOA Architecture” then you said it all! “A” in SOA stands for architecture and you say there is no such thing as SOA architecture. True!! I agree. The whole SOA is a super-hype. A name without any product behind it. Without any meaning behind it. Or better with many products and meanings behind it! A name must mean something. It must be clear to the people who coined the word first. Here we see too many interpretations and definitions for SOA! SOA hype will soon die down… it already has in many places…though we see new incarnations appearing here and there!
Hi Gopi,Thanks a lot for your reply. It’s very confusing for new-comers, students to have a clear definition of SOA. You can’t say SOA is a framework or architecture, it’s more a methodology to follow when integrating different applications using standards.I wouldn’t say SOA is a hype, more and more standards are being developed to support platform- and technology-independend interactions intercompany and cross companies.I started these blog posts because we’re offering introduction and intermediary courses for high schools and there was a lot of confusion regarding SOA. Mostly I talk about integration projects and standards instead of SOA.