"SOA meets the real world"

New in InfoWorld -- " Five big organizations launch ambitious service-oriented architecture initiatives and explain their objectives, obstacles, and solutions."

What I like best is at the beginning:

SOA turns the conventional model of enterprise software development on its head. Normally, programmers write software based on a set of well-defined requirements. SOA demands that organizations create an ecosystem of services that may ultimately have an army of stakeholders inside and outside the firewall.

All the technology debates that circle around services orientation --Java vs. .NET, REST vs WS, simplicity vs complexity -- are beside the point if people don`t grasp the basic point that the really hard thing to do is come to that vision of an ecosystem of services.  That`s where the real benefits -- and the big costs and risks --  lie, not in the plumbing. 

A couple of random thoughts after reading through them:

• "Protocol independence" is scorned by REST advocates, but notice the various organizations that had to deal with the reality that MQ and JMS transport systems were pervasive and nobody apparently wanted to replace them with HTTP. In fact, I can`t find the string "HTTP" in any of those articles.
  
• One of the tenets of REST is to identify resources with URIs; note the hospital case where the really hard part was to figure out which unique person the various bits of data referred to, not whether to identify the people with URIs or database keys or whatever.
• None of these systems ended up being all that loosely coupled as far as I could see. 
  
• None of these were "on the Web", so they just support the idea that web services approaches have success stories in the more controlled world of enterprises with management hierarchies and legacy systems that work, even if they don`t interoperate.    There`s still no evidence that these approaches would scale to the Web, or would be appropriate for  new Web-based applications of the sort that MSN, Yahoo, Google, and a lot of smaller companies are building. 
  

[Quick correction added:  "NO evidence that these approaches would scale to the Web."   Leaving out the "no" changes the meaning rather drastically!]