Abstract
Service orientation and SOA are very successful philosophies of the development of modern software systems. It is often forgotten that service orientation is rather a philosophy using the methods and having the aim that can be different for SMB than for large enterprises.
Small companies require more reuse of legacy systems. They use a quite small number of services and there is a tendency to apply and integrate batch systems and non-standard communication protocols.
Such solutions can use only some of the standards developed e.g. by OASIS. The reason is that such standards prefer in fact rather systems formed by fine-grained services.
Small and middle-sized enterprises typically integrate not only legacy systems and batch systems, but also open-source and third-party products. Surprisingly enough many of these practices are advantageous for large enterprises as well.
Neglecting this fact is neglecting the pragmatic aspects of SOA; it is likely the main reason of the ?failures? of SOA.