Came across this article about the real world implementation of SOA at Standard Life. It was posted back I 2005 but demonstrates that this is not something that is new and it can certainly work.

This second article from 2006 goes on a little further by explaining that while SOA is used a lot throughout the group the bulk of the systems are still running on non-SOA systems.

The main point I wanted to make from these two articles going back a fair bit of time is that while SOA is being thrown around as a new term, it has in fact been around for some time.