To help Con-way avoid being commoditized in the increasingly competitive freight industry, its IT shop was forced to find ways to deliver applications more quickly. Before the move to the SOA, Con-way had a one-day lag between changes in operational data and the update of back-end systems to reflect those changes. Now, that information -- contained in various front- and back-office systems -- is in sync, Tibbling said.

In addition, the SOA supports the electronic transmission of data to customs officials in Canada. That has allowed the company to slash the time it takes for one of its trucks to be cleared to cross the border from two to three hours to less than a minute, Tibbling said. "After the first few projects, we were able to show we could get faster times to market and we could reduce development costs," she said.

But to get Con-way to where it is now, the architects had to evangelize SOA to developers and business users, she said. For developers, selling SOA meant emphasizing that they could stop doing "daily grind" common coding. It also meant setting up a services repository with clearly defined data about the functions of various services. That move is aimed at helping developers trust that the services would work as advertised, according to Tibbling.

"SOA is not something the business directly cares about," she said. "You have to identify the value that they care about, and that is the value you will sell."

Intuit Inc. is relying on SOA to enable it to more quickly absorb new acquisitions and to more easily integrate data related to customers and processes, said Robert Roth, director of shared development and services at the Mountain View, Calif-based company. After 25 acquisitions, Intuit found itself with customer interaction across more channels than it ever had, and it needed ways to move data across the company quickly, Roth said