Service orientation is a means for building distributed systems. At its most abstract level, service orientation views everything – from the mainframe application to the printer to the shipping-dock clerk to the overnight delivery company—as a service provider. Service providers expose capabilities through interfaces, and service-oriented architecture maps these capabilities and interfaces so they can be orchestrated into processes. The service model is "fractal": the newly formed process is a service itself, exposing a new, aggregated capability.

While there are different perspectives on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), there is widespread agreement that it is not a product or a technology but an approach, a style of architecture that uses the service model to enable integration across diverse systems, encapsulating the idiosyncrasies of diverse and often proprietary platforms, technologies and protocols.

Microsoft this week hosted its annual SOA and Business Processes Conference in Redmond, where customers and industry partners met to discuss a "real-world" approach to SOA, and how it can be used to solve troubling business challenges. PressPass spoke with John deVadoss, director of Architecture Strategy at Microsoft, about the company’s SOA-related work and how its support of Web services has helped make Service Orientation mainstream. DeVadoss’ team is responsible for Microsoft’s Architecture Strategy and helping customers, and partners create business value from their technology investments