SOA comes down to earth - Veterans of SOA projects impart lessons learned.(service oriented architecture)(InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum)(Brief Article)

Moving past concept into real-world deployments, SOA initiatives are starting to bear fruit, and with that harvest come valuable lessons for IT professionals. At InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum in New York last week, attendees heard practical advice from enterprises on the leading edge of the nascent technology.

SOA requires enterprise architecture and a vision for your company's business processes, said Andy Brown, chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch.

"You have to have enterprise architecture and goals about how you want processes to function -- where you want to be in a year's time. It comes down to business aspirations, operating principles, and …