IBM is holding its annual IMPACT SOA event this week, and despite rumors of the "death" of SOA, it's clear IBM sees SOA as an important strategy across its product line. As shown by recent announcements, IBM is also concentrating on positioning SOA as part of a broader picture involving cloud computing and virtualization. The purpose across all these disciplines is the same-to abstract complexity away from users, and enable them to focus resources on business development, not worrying about technical infrastructure. IBM says organizations are facing a "complexity and affordability crisis, in which costs to manage and power operations are becoming more expensive than the hardware and software itself."