Chances are you've already had your hands in a service-oriented-architecture project or two. Of the 11,000 largest enterprises worldwide, 95% are engaged in "some type of effort to implement SOA," says Susan Eustis, president of WinterGreen Research. "Most of these projects have started out as compliance efforts and have been extended to include a dashboard that is used to manage the business. SOA starts out as a small trial initiative before it is expanded."

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With so much work going on, the hype around SOA has eroded. In its place are more than a few startling truths: When it comes to SOA, the network is everything. Not every project is SOA friendly. An often shockingly expensive initial SOA project will pay for itself repeatedly over time, as other projects reuse the stockpile of services -- provided you've made that reuse easy (see "Crazy SOA costs grow sane over time"). In addition, the decades-old .Net/Java split still prevails in the SOA world.

The good news is that SOA has matured enough that the school-of-hard-knocks lessons mostly have been learned, analysts say. "In the last few years, SOA was touted as the next big thing, and then these projects rolled out that were basically Web services," says Kamran Ozair, CTO of MindTree Consulting. "People learned the hard way that this was not the right way to go about it."

Perhaps the biggest school-of-hard-knocks lesson is when not to use a services-approach. "SOA is not a means to an end. You need to use it in the context of solving a business problem," says Steven Weiskircher, vice president of IT for audio-electronics merchant Crutchfield, in Charlottesville, Va. (see "Four ways to make SOA about the business").