Load balancers, name servers (e.g. DNS), even stock brokerage services are existing examples of virtual services in the worlds of networking and financial services. In the arena of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), virtual services and their supporting abstraction layer are critical to address the operational, integration, security and life cycle issues that delay and derail SOA deployment and success.

This paper will introduce the concept of virtual services for SOAs and provide details of the characteristics of virtual services that enable SOA success.