Service-oriented architecture is an inescapable IT-industry buzzphrase. It's also a sprawling, eye-glazing abstraction that means many things to many people. In this Technology Insider, SOA guru James Kobielus analyzes the ROI of SOAs, defines key SOA concepts and describes the SOA infrastructure. Go online for stories on what needs to happen for SOAs to take off.

The ROI of SOA
Fundamentally, SOA is a development methodology that encourages sharing of remotely invocable application functions throughout networks. It's a way of doing more with less, where applications can be built more quickly and incrementally, with fewer lines

3 steps to SOA nirvana
Primer on the three core concepts behind service-oriented architectures.

Fuzzy math
SOA is still a fuzzy concept to many corporate IT professionals. According to a recent IDG Research Services Group survey, IT professionals are almost evenly split between people who claim some familiarity with SOA (52%) and those who admit they haven't a clue (48%). Likewise, the split was almost even between those respondents who reported strong confidence in SOA's long-term potential (55%) and those whose confidence was lacking or lackluster (45%).

The SOA tool kit
The principal layers of an SOA-enabling infrastructure are service brokers, orchestration engines, message-oriented middleware environments and service-level management tools.

SOA standards remain a work in progress
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards has established two technical committees to clarify industry understanding of SOA approaches, but progress continues to be slow.

Vendors step up to the SOA plate
Various companies have established SOA-related initiatives. They include IBM, SAP, Systinet, Infravio

Web services standards need to mature before SOA can really take off
Web services standards need to mature before SOA can really take off.