In an interview, Loraine Lawson asked Gartner Vice President Nick Gall, who is credited with first describing Web-oriented architecture (WOA), to give business and IT leaders the bottom line about the WOA versus SOA debate.

When asked about the origins of the term WOA, Gall said

The earliest entry I can find is back in fall of 2005. I presented at a conference to use the term and Whit Andrew - another one of our vice presidents - blogged about my use of the term WOA [... After observing how web services were emerging outside of ] Gartner's clients - semi-large corporations.

He observed that the architectural style that came closest to resembling this emerging style were RESTful services. but "REST raised a lot of hackles and there was a lot of misunderstanding about what REST really meant". and so a new term was coined.