I recently replied to Sean Wolfe, the Editor of SOA Pipeline, when he asked this question:

"I STRONGLY believe that SOA can live up to its hype - without any doubt in my mind.  Companies should not rush their SOA adoption, spend some serious time on evaluating all the Business Processes, get a little advice if they don’t really feel comfortable proceeding on their own, and proceed with exposing services that do one thing and one thing only.

This is exactly what we tried to demonstrate with our XWebServices.com portal.  If you look at the Web Services we offer, none are a mixture of functionality.  The best example is the XWeb1003 Web Service.  Its sole purpose it to allow for storage and retrieval of Mortgage Loan Applications. This Web Service can then be combined in different applications with a Service from someone like TransUnion to get a credit report from. The data from the TransUnion Service could then be used to populate the Liabilities section of the application, but it is the APPLICATIONS responsibility to do this – not having it embedded into the XWeb1003 Web Service allows for this Service to then be reused for any other Credit Reporting needs. A company like Fannie Mae could then expose a Web Service that would receive the application data (again, from an application) and proceed with the pipeline processing."

How do you feel about SOA living up to its hype?