Building a SOA is never a blue-chip bet, and that's a big problem when your service-oriented architecture is destined to be the backbone for new Wall Street trading applications. Wachovia Corporate Investment Bank couldn't afford to gamble: When the heat is on, its services must be there at whatever scale required, with response times measured in thousandths of a second.

That's a goal many SOA implementers say is out of reach, according to InformationWeek Research. When we asked if they were using SOA and/or Web services to integrate applications, 82% of 278 tech professionals in a recent survey say yes. But architecting a SOA so that it can be turned into an on-demand utility? That's still an elusive dream, with 69% of those implementing them saying they'd met some but not all of their business goals, and 15% saying they hadn't met benchmarks, period. Of that latter group, 18% say they considered the technology too immature for production use.

Not good enough for Wachovia Corp.'s Wachovia Corporate Investment Bank unit, which provides cash management, trading services, and risk management to corporate and institutional money manager clients. The unit generates 25% of its parent company's profit, so any SOA had to qualify as a true service-oriented utility with guaranteed customer response times.

That 25% profit figure is impressive, but it hasn't always been the case, says Tony Bishop, chief architect of the unit, who joined Wachovia two years ago at the behest of CIO Susan Certoma. At the start of this decade, Wachovia lagged far behind the top 10 Wall Street trading and money management firms, a who's who that included heavy hitters such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.

Certoma had plotted a technical transition to get the company to a place where it could take advantage of a SOA. Bishop was charged with designing the architecture to carry out her ambitious plan, a cornerstone of which was the move to service-oriented utility computing.

Now, Wachovia is ranked in that top 10.