A number of customers that I work with on a regular basis make a common mistake that reminds of the fads in the health and fitness, they want to buy SOA just like everyone want to buy the fitness pills. Is there something like SOA in a box? Is SOA something you can buy, unwrap and start using?

Why not. Just buy a data services generation tool, wrap it around a business rules engine, put some security around it, make it discoverable using a service registry, expose the services via service bus, create a BPM around these services and to top it off get a plug and play composite portal and you have what I call the BOB ( Best of Breed ) SOA. It is a different question, whether it meets the business requirements or adds any business value.

What we forget as technicians is "What got us here will not get us there", meaning the core concept behind SOA is to enable business agility and ability to think business. Our BOB thinking is what has brought our trust level with our users to the point where most IT CIO's are now recruited from the business ranks of the organization. We need to remember the SOA is about business and not IT, the focus should be to create business value first and then deciding what we need for our product stack. It is not about service registries, or governance tools first, those are means to deliver business value.

So stop shopping for a SOA, build one in collaboration with your business or your business will find someone else who can.