“Let me be blunt here: this whole SOA hype is pure marketing-poop. I mean: every developer on the planet knows that if you have several different elements in your application (gui, business logic, perhaps even a data-layer), element E provides services for element F and F is consumer of the services of element E. That's as old as what, client-server? Similar for library L which provides a set of functionality for application A which loads L at runtime. Offering a 'service' is nothing more than offering functionality (in any form you may think of) to others.

On a sunny day, some marketing department thought it would be great if the company's products would get a new 'unique' feature. What would be better than to re-hash the current features by giving them a new name? After days of brainstorming, consulting expensive advisors and visiting hand-reading guru's, they came up with... Service Oriented Architecture, better known as SOATM©®. SOATM©® would be the unique new feature of their products, which would give them an edge on the competition! Now, in the country were I live, The Netherlands, this acronym was already taken: "Seksueel Overdraagbare Aandoeningen", which roughly translates to: "Deceases transferable through sexual intercourse". Of course an unlucky coincidence. ‘

Although I’m not as skeptical, this guy has a point. Indeed, as I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen, there is not a lot of new stuff here. Indeed I would call a SOA a good architecture, which is what it is. We’ve been attempting to do that for years.

The guy has a point. While I would not call it “marketing-poop” I would say we are reinventing old stuff with a new buzzword, with some new technology surrounding it.