A lot of people are looking at SOA as an attempt to re-market Web services. From the research we've done, there is every indication that SOA is shaping into a legitimate architectural model that separates itself from past distributed architectures through a distinct design paradigm called service-orientation. Although the popularity of Web services technologies like WSDL and
SOAP are, to a large part, responsible for putting SOA into the limelight, they are not the only means of applying service-orientation. It's best to view SOA and service-orientation as providing a distinct approach for building enterprise solutions and the Web services technology set as the most popular implementation option for service-oriented solutions.