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SOA in the 'Trough of Disillusionment'

In my previous post I discussed what appeared to be the demise of distributed computing, when in reality it had been subsumed into the whirlwind of hype that is cloud computing.  Building on ideas and repackaging them as revolutionary concepts is not a new thing in IT, and cloud computing is the latest example of this.  Another good example, and what I will be discussing in this post, is the effect distributed computing has had on another industry shaping concept - Service Orientated Architecture.
 
SOA takes the notion of distributed computing, focussing primarily on sharing of hardware services, and extends it to software in the form of shared services.  A shared infrastructure in a 'grid' format is used to support a range of software services which execute simple reusable business tasks, such as ‘Get Data’, ‘Store Data’ or ‘Print’.  Using this example, a business requirement such as ‘the system should be able to retrieve a file, store it locally and print a physical copy’ can be satisfied by linking the three individual services together. 

Hanging a number of fine grained (helper services performing simple tasks such as ‘Store Data’) and coarse grained services (long running services that often orchestrate a number of other fine grained services) together will perform the end to end functionality required by a single project; mixing and matching this pool of reusable services enables you to perform the functionality of multiple projects.  To improve flexibility of the end solution and facilitate this ‘pick and choose’ pool of reusable services, each service should be loosely coupled, maintainable, adaptable and extendable, allowing for easy bug fixing and future enhancements without having to worry about users of a service.
 
In 2007, SOA was named by Gartner as the predominant approach for building IT solutions in the coming 3-4 years.  Now, Gartner recognise that, given how fickle and fast-paced the IT industry is, SOA has passed the peak of inflated expectations and is now in the trough of disillusionment, as defined by the Gartner ‘hype cycle’ - now is the time to prove that SOA is a viable method of delivery.  Capgemini, amongst other IT Consulting companies, has shown that SOA can be used in the real world to deliver mission-critical solutions at Corus and highly available, scalable and secure solutions at ING Direct.
 
SOA, contrary to what many may say, is here to stay - proof of this can be seen by the magnitude of blue-chip vendors releasing stable design time governance SOA tools, such as Oracle Enterprise Repository, and runtime governance tools, such as IBM Trivoli Composite Application Manager.  Have you experienced SOA delivery?  If so, did it live up to expectations?