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First of all. Good initiative : starting a discussion on the question whether or not SOA is the silver bullet, the newest IT hype or just a nasty disease (not exactly your words).
In the initial statement and the subsequent reactions I see a couple of different themes. (1) What should be understood by "services" and are they so different from "components" in the traditional sense of the word? (2) What is the role of the "ESB" in a service oriented architecture? Is an ESB a MUST or can we request and provide service without intervention of an ESB? By the way what do we mean by an ESB? (3) How come SOA prophets seem to think that all experience from enterprise architecture is no longer valid?
In my view all three themes need attention.
Ad (1) In Ziv Baida's thesis on service bundlining read a good definition of "service". Ziv makes a distinction between (business) services, e-services and web services. I think that in order to avoid confusion we have to adopt a similar definition. Ziv's e-service is very similar to a component with an interface, a runnable an data. Ziv's business service is not comparable to a component. This type of service does not need to be fully automated; i.e. can also contain human interventions or even be completely manual. If you think about it in this way service level management (to give an example) is a SUPERSET of IT service level management.
Ad (2) Litteraly Service Oriented Architecture deals with providing and requesting services. I see no good reason why this could not be done without an ESB. I realize that in saying this I divert from the official message that my employer (IBM) is bringing to the market.
Ad (3) I think you are absolutely right in stating that all old (good) experience from Enterprise Architecture (and Component Modeling and Operational Modeling and ITIL and.....so on and so forth) still apply. We just started an interest group on SOA governance and management and one of our first conclusions was that it partly builds on EA, partly on ITIL.
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