Creating service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions means rethinking the practices currently in use to build systems, reconsidering the skills in an organization, and redefining the ways in which team members collaborate. A service orientation contributes to the development of solutions that are assembled from disparate applications, and SOA is an architectural style that emphasizes loose coupling of independent service providers. This perspective on service orientation is known as service-oriented development of applications (SODA). SODA encompasses composition, adaptive process management, service-based interoperability and integration, discovery and description, and rapid application maintenance. In this paper, we focus on how IBM supports SODA, the relationship of SODA to the IBM Rational Software Development Platform (RSDP), and how IBM's core approach to design and construction—model-driven development—is an essential element in creating effective and efficient services and service-oriented solutions. We explore the concepts behind these approaches and illustrate their realization with illustrative examples from customer experiences.