So says Neels van Tonder, CEO of UCS Software Manufacturing, the software development outsourcing arm of JSE Securities Exchange-listed UCS Group.

"Companies are increasingly revamping their middle and back-end technology tiers, and creating new value streams from leveraging off SOAs. In fact, SOAs and Web services are becoming an alluring mixture in the world of seamless communication, where CIOs are turning their attention to this type of software, so that they can do away with disparate information systems that battle to talk to each other - very often necessitating replacement.

"What is happening is that CIOs are increasingly discovering this new class of software - software with real intelligence, rich media and 'interactivity', as well as the ability to access services and data, which is now referred to as service-orientated clients (SOCs). But why do we need to start looking at this SOC environment and, goodness, with all the acronyms floating around the IT industry, what is it? Just a bit more huff and puff?

Not according to the IT pundits - this is the way of the future in the corporate information world. The browser was designed for browsing static documents, not delivering vibrant applications - those that have intelligence and remember why you wanted them in the first place when you recall them to your screen. While everything might look and smell like leading-edge, there are still vast improvements to be made, vast improvements that are literally waiting around the corner.

"Many of our business-critical applications," continues Van Tonder, "are stored and accessed in what can really be described as a static environment. This was great stuff five years ago, but not now. Right now, well, at least in the main, many business critical applications are dependent on client software that is built on a page metaphor with forward/back/home buttons, bookmarks and weird little 'things' you pick up while browsing the Web, called cookies."

According to Van Tonder: "Technology needs to move on with time". He adds that the Web-based user interface and client-level tier are no longer gee-whiz like they used to be a few years ago. "This information, which is stored in this now antiquated on-line environment, is hard to access - let alone print - in an off-line environment. Having said that, I think I hear someone saying: 'but which corporation these days is ever off-line?'

This fact notwithstanding, quality assurance teams spend countless hours debugging cross-browser applications because different browser versions from different vendors behave differently on different operating systems. This is a hard-core environment for staff to work in - and it is very capricious."

Van Tonder says that SOA, meanwhile: "is almost exactly what the name implies - a client that is designed to interact with services. By leveraging off an SOA architecture, developers can develop rich Internet applications (RAI) that make SOA data meaningful and useful to humans - and that, of course, he adds, "means useful to companies".

SOAs also work on-line or off-line, and are able to connect with message-orientated middleware, and can access and merge data, documents, forms, and audio and video streams - and all this in a wholly interactive environment. SOAs basically make it easier for users to operate either inside or outside the browser context.

As SOA and spin-offs, such as RIA, evolve, senior management will be able to overcome the problem of diverse silos of information. They will be able to make decisions using sophisticated desktop-like applications that integrate rich data visualisation and application components such as data grids, graphical charts, multimedia audio and video, and a complete real-time data push-and-pull to their desktops.

Information across the enterprise will be easily accessible and will be able to be manipulated in various manners in order to extract and produce useful information. The problem of information sitting in different 'information silos' will be a thing of the past," he concludes.