I'm attending Gartner's AADI conference this week.  They might as well call this the Application Platform as a Service (APaaS) conference as its all about the Cloud, SOA, BPM, and distributed application development.  It's a very nice to hear Gartner recognizing and promoting the fact that "BPM needs SOA to be successful" and "you can't skip SOA to get to the Cloud".  After all the "SOA is dead" messaging I've been seeing, its nice to see such an influential advisor recognize that dismissing SOA is an attempt to dismiss fundamental issues that are core to any distributed systems moving forward.