'SOA blah blah'

In a recent post, James Governor observes how a conference presenter described what amounted to a service-oriented architecture without invoking the term (or acronym) even once:

"I went to a great session today led by Jim Raper, manager of data administration at City of Charlotte, North Carolina. He talked about the straightforward but powerful approach to orchestration his organization uses, to enable central data warehousing services to be used flexibly by end users, with their own chosen semantics for entities. Jim didn't use the SOA word once, but the approach was undoubtedly service oriented. If this had of been an analyst or vendor presentation it would have likely been SOA blah blah."

James puts it this way: "Smart approaches to technology however will be here long after the SOA buzz has moved on. I am not arguing that SOA isn't valuable, but rather you don't have to call it that to get the value of the approach. It's the architecture, stupid."

No argument here.