In the enterprise IT environment today, modern middleware technologies make it easier to expose existing or new business applications as sets of services. However, with the mashup of cloud-based services and enterprise data center services, the visibility of how a service created today will be used in the future gets murkier.

This is because it's difficult to predict how a service will be consumed over long periods of time and by which consumers, and further how the service may be integrated with other services or legacy applications to create new composite services. It also remains a challenge to architect services in such a way that service upgrades don't affect consumers unpredictably. The hype of "just create services with an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and you'll have the benefits of a service architecture such as lower costs and software reuse" typically leads to services proliferation and little reuse.