"SODA heralds a new age of alignment between the needs of the business, the style of the programming and the platforms of deployment."

With the industry still buzzing about SOA in general, Oracle and others are now talking about SOA 2.0.

Oracle officials talked up this next-generation version of SOA at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco last week.

"SOA 2.0 is the term that we're using to talk about the combination of service oriented architecture and event-driven architecture," according to Steve Harris, vice president of Oracle Fusion middleware.

The term, SOA 2.0, is also being championed by Gartner's Yefim Natis, a vice president and distinguished analyst at the firm.