Over the last decade, the role of information technology in enterprises has been transforming from one of providing automation services to one of enabling business innovation. IT’s charter is now closely aligned with the business goals and processes in a company and to support this charter, enterprise application architecture is shifting towards what’s commonly referred to as a services-oriented architecture (SOA), or an enterprise-services architecture [1, 2]. In this talk, I want to discuss the shift to this new architecture and some ramifications of this, in particular some challenges posed by this shift for our research community to pursue. Keywords Service-oriented architecture, model-driven development, data management, metadata management.