All,
This is a fantastic paper from ARM Research that sums-up the current state of play in the SOA market with IBM and Microsoft here.
I am constantly frustrated why Microsoft doesn't shout from the roof-tops that it has a compelling SOA solutions. I believe Microsoft infact has the most complete end-to-end tool-set for SOA. The article states that the reason is "Microsoft believes that eventual backlash to all the hype around SOA shifts focus away from the real benefits that SOA can bring, so it has begun to provide guidance to customers to help customers be more successful." On reflection they are indeed right as the hype around SOA has become detrimental to the whole cause as companies seemingly are 'making hay whilst the Sunshine's'.
However, as yet I haven't seen that many storms of reasonable descent, yes there are examples out there and do have strong ideas, but there isn't as yet a killer reason I've seen yet not to take the SOA route if you have integration to legacy systems issues.
So is it to early to say that SOA is gaining acceptance?
Well I would say yes, until such time as we have an agreed tangable definition of what SOA is that is universally agreed? Without it, I believe SOA will never gain acceptance as how can we possible have best practices that are truly technology and vendor agnostic when the guiding reason for doing SOA in the first place is ... to integrate your systems.