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For those of you in the know, SOA is Service Oriented Architecture, and it’s one of those terribly geeky things that rely defy definition or classification.

What is SOA? Well, it’s best if I go to a source that at least tries to define it. Here goes from Google:

A service-oriented architecture is a collection of services that communicate with each other. The services are self-contained and do not depend on the context or state of the other service. They work within a distributed systems architecture.

Okay, so its a bit abstract, and I have to admit that even in my integration-aware consciousness, I feel like that guy who, after asking a million questions, finds out that what people are saying is exactly what he was thinking, but it was couched in unfamiliar terms.

All right, then, here’s an example from XML.com:

Let’s look at an example of SOA which is likely to be found in your living room. Take a CD for instance. If you want to play it, you put your CD into a CD player and the player plays it for you. The CD player offers a CD playing service. Which is nice because you can replace one CD player with another. You can play the same CD on a portable player or on your expensive stereo. They both offer the same CD playing service, but the quality of service is different.

That’s a bit better–at least we can get a handle on SOA now. And that’s the point. How can you market something as intagible (but yet ultimately, useful to business) as SOA? You can create blogs and forums that allow users to talk about it, you can publish case studies and white papers, and you can print up really slick four-color brochures.

But how about making a movie? About a hapless protagonist who returns to his former company as CEO and then puts in play SOA initiatives to solve problems? All done in a kind of thriller noir approach that mashes together quality control initiatives with kidnappings and corporate espionage?

Bravo IBM for coming up with this. The trailer certainly is exciting!
See the movie here.

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