Marketing firm Gartner Group published a short brief that promoted the SCA and its included technology of Service Data Objects (SDO) in December 2005 .
[8] The SCA Assembly Model consists of a series of artifacts, which are defined by elements contained in XML files.
An SCA runtime may have other non-standard representations of the artifacts represented by these XML files, and may allow for the configuration of systems to be modified dynamically.
An SCA System represents a set of services providing an area of business functionality that is controlled by a single organization.
To help build and configure the SCA System, Composites can be used as component implementations, in the same way as Java classes or BPEL processes.
The capture and expression of non-functional requirements, such as security, is an important aspect of service definition, and affects SCA throughout the life-cycle of components and compositions.
SCA provides the Policy Framework to support specification of constraints, capabilities and Quality of Service (QoS) expectations, from component design through to concrete deployment.
Participation in these OASIS SCA TCs remains open to all companies, non-profit groups, governments, academic institutions, and individuals.