SOA and Web Services: what's all the hype about?

For the last few years, Web Services have been touted as the Next Big Thing in computing, promising to change the way we develop and use software. But have Web Services lived up to their promise? A standardized way to expose business logic across the Internet, the adoption of Web services promise to make it far easier to write cooperative, distributed, multi-company applications. In 2005, we hear more about new concepts such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a service (SaaS), REST, BPEL, etc. Are these just marketing terms? Are they the same thing as Web Services, or something new? Mike will give a brief overview of the technical and business landscape driving these new architectures and peel away the hype to see what they are all about. We'll discuss security, reliability, and scalability issues; vendor interoperability; and the future of service-based systems.