While progress toward that vision may seem slow, the groundwork is being laid at the standards level. In his white paper "Converged Communications," (registration required) Reinecke lists 13 industry standards that range from Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) to Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) that form the basis of the architecture and are vital to the development of SOA.

According to Reinecke, one of the major reasons that object-oriented architecture, which, along with the Internet, can be viewed as the immediate progenitors of SOA, never succeeded outside some small, highly controlled environments, was the lack of an adequate base of industry standards.

This time, he says, the XML standards and the business process languages are established, and at the XML layer most presentation layers are set. "So we have a much better chance of getting it right."

At the applications level, he says, "it is clear that the market will no longer accept the vendor-proprietary solutions of the past." The replacement of proprietary software with standards-based applications is forming the basis for a converged network architecture.

"In the last 12 months, SOA has started to gain traction," he says. "Cisco has a couple of elements, and Active Directory is gaining wide adoption as the de facto directory standard." This is particularly important because the directory will be at the center of the SOA architecture, and Active Directory is becoming the catalyst for change.