Erasing the bad taste of legacy spaghetti

IBM's going ga-ga for SOA. So is SAP and BEA and Microsoft and Oracle and Hewlett-Packard and--well, you get the picture. Anybody even remotely interested in the enterprise software business is spitting out reams of PR about how they can help customers attain corporate nirvana by adopting services-oriented architecture (and paying fat fees for the privilege.)

Since SOA is already on everyone's lips, how long before Business Week gives it the kiss of death by devoting a cover story to the topic?

I'm not so sure. SOA might very well fade away, but it would be replaced by another acronym that purports to basically do the same thing. That's because the challenge has always been how to apply technology to business processes. Like all phases and definitions in technolog--and SOA is no different--the acronyms unfortunately get in the way.

SOA is an umbrella term that describes the ways companies might go about building and connecting their back-end systems--the idea being to reduce corporate costs while increasing flexibility.

The important idea here is that companies are desperate for the tech industry to help them better use technology to improve their business execution. And there's so much legacy spaghetti lying around corporate IT departments that it's just a royal mess.

But before spending one penny more, why aren't more IT directors holding their sales representatives' feet to the fire to get better answers as to why this time things are going to be different?