I've been talking about SOA for a while now it's finally time to (try to) properly define it

I've publised this as a 5 posts on my DDJ blog and I thought it was good enough to be publised as a single whitepaper:

"Service Oriented Architecture or SOA for short has been with us for quite a  while.  Yefim V. Natiz, a Gartner’s analyst, first talked about SOA back  in 1996. However it seems that only in the recent year or so SOA has matured enough for real systems based on the SOA concepts to start to appear – or has it?  There is so much hype and misconceptions surrounding SOA that we first have to clear them all up before we can explain what SOA is – let alone identify who really uses it...." (Download full PDF (670K))

You can see additional presentations and papers I wrote here