"This is 'outside-in' SOA," Linthicum continues, by which he means in essence reusing service in an enterprise not created by that enterprise, much as we do today with information on the Web.

According to Linthicum, those services outside of the enterprise existing on the Internet create a "Universal SOA" - ready to connect to your enterprise SOA, perhaps providing more value.

"This is nothing new, by the way,: he adds. "We been talking Universal SOA for some time now, at least the notion, we are just seeing bits and pieces appearing today."

Linthicum is an internationally known application integration and service-oriented architecture expert. In his career he has formed many of the ideas for modern distributed computing including EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and B2B application integration, and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), approaches and technology in wide use today.

He's held key technology management roles with a number of organizations including CTO of Mercator, SAGA Software, Mobil Oil, EDS, AT&T, and Ernst and Young. In addition he was an associate professor of computer science for eight years, and continues to lecture at major technical colleges and universities. He has authored over 500 articles for major computing publications, and has monthly columns in several popular industry magazines. His latest book, Next Generation Application Integration, was just released and is already a bestseller.