Can SOA deliver on integration promises ?

Much of what SOA was related to in the early days were the Web Services standards that enabled much quicker, cost effective integration of data and business logic.

One of the goals of 'SOA' was the concept of using best of breed technologies that integrate together. The idea that you could pick the best technology for the job whether it was from vendor a, b or c and it would work with the best of what vendors x, y and z delivered was a very attractive one.

Yet another goal of 'SOA' is reuse of services which comes down to the core of the question here. If the SOA stack is proprietary, it makes integration with other technologies and thus reuse from them as difficult and expensive as it ever was.

However, the larger vendors have sadly dumbed down what was promised by insisting on you buying 'their' SOA stack of software and providing some integration possibilities using standards on the outside but with proprietary internals with dependencies on their particular stacks.

If SOA only promised that we would have services, any well run IT organization has been building 'services' for many years that are still reused on a regular basis today.

One of the original promises of SOA was to allow better, more cost effective integration between best of breed technologies that could then deliver the services that the business required throughout the enterprise. The easier integration facilitates a level of reuse not possible with proprietary stacks. This ease of integration applies in the Cloud more than ever as what organization wants to simply spend money to move to another proprietaray environment in the Cloud ?

The SOA Gateway is a 'best of breed' technology that makes accessing your data and business logic easier while also working with any other 'best of breed' technologies from other organizations.