In gaming and gambling, the odds always favour the house. But for two organisations within the industry, Harrah’s in the US and the UK’s government-owned Tote, betting on an emerging technology has brought winnings all round.

Service-oriented architecture, or SOA, is a way of developing IT systems based not around specific applications or even hardware, but business services. The idea is to make IT leaner, more efficient and easier to update. Most of all, SOA promises to align IT more closely with the needs of the business.