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In an article titled SOA by any other name, Phil Wainewright discusses the confusion with the term “SOA”;

The only reason for using these phrases is if they help establish shared meaning that allows people to effectively exchange information and constructively expand their knowledge.

No matter what position you take in the SOA vs. REST debate, I think you really have to respect that “RESTfulness” is testable, and in fact that the probability of any given architecture or architectural style being tested in the affirmative, is very small, something the Third Law of Thermodynamics tells us is desirable. If practically every distributed infrastructure ever developed is an SOA, then the term is of no value, either when trying to communicate with somebody else, or when designing a distributed system.

Joe McKendrick reports on a Webservices.org survey which shows that small to medium sized businesses aren’t doing SOA. No surprise there, really, since the cost of all this new Web services software, and the complexity of the architecture, is so high.

Perhaps somebody should ask those businesses if they’re exchanging any data with anybody (customers, partners, service providers like banks, etc..), over the Web? I’d expect the numbers would be quite high, probably higher than for SOA in big business.