SOA has emerged as the most significant shift in how applications are designed, developed and implemented in the last 10 years.

A consortium of software vendors and consultants recently introduced the SOA Maturity Model, which is designed to provide IT decision makers with a framework for benchmarking the strategic value of their SOA implementations and planning. The model is divided into five levels.

Level 1: Initial services

At the initial stage, an organization creates definitions for services and integrates SOA into methodologies for project development. In a financial-services environment, a Level 1 project may use an application server or an enterprise service bus (ESB) adapter to create simple SOAP and HTTP web service invocations between a management system that places an order and a trading service that accepts the order.

Level 2: Architected services