"...services must have implementation, location, and presentation-independent definitions."

"...a well-designed SOA assumes nothing about where or how the Services are implemented — they might as well be outsourced."

"...if companies can define abstracted Service interfaces, the details of who implements those Services and where those Services reside are basically irrelevant."

"...SOA not only makes outsourcing simpler, but it in fact motivates companies to consider outsourcing as a viable alternative when it might not have even been possible in the past."

Ron mentioned that it is difficult to outsource things that are tied to the organization. It may actually cost more to outsource these due to the costs and complexity of breaking the connections between processes, systems and infrastructure. The big takeaway from the conversation was his statement, "The more you do SOA the easier it is to push things outside the company."

I also reached out to David Chou, an architect at Microsoft to see what the software giant is thinking about all of this. David calls cloud computing the "next evolution of SOA." Microsoft sees that the future of software is in subscription services in the cloud and the days of buying software and installing it on desktops and on premise servers are quickly fading away. That is why Microsoft is moving many of their server products to the cloud and investing in data centers to support what David calls "Sharepoint, Exchange, Windows Live and Biztalk products.

In Nicholas Carr's new book, The Big Switch, he writes extensively about how information technology is following the same path of becoming a commodity resource that electricity did decades ago. He sees a future where everything runs in the cloud and is broken down into smaller parts. For example, yesterday's newspaper is now distributed as individual pieces of information on the Web and the consumers of the information may not even be aware of the source that provided it. The evolution of the newspaper industry closely matches how software has evolved. Companies that recognize this and embrace flexible architectures like SOA will be able to change to meet the new consumer expectations. Companies without a flexible architecture will become outdated and irrelevant.