Conclusion
SOA is very definitely the current flavor of the month! The service-oriented model is both simple and powerful in that the complexities of the underlying IT infrastructure are less important to the service consumers. One aspect of SOA not often mentioned is the fact that it facilitates migration from traditional IT architectures. You can implement a SOA and phase in the services one-by-one as you gain experience. Axis is well suited to such arrangements.
Axis operates in conjunction with an application server, which provides additional benefits in the form of separation of concerns. Separating concerns helps to make the Axis/Tomcat product pair a robust SOA platform.
So, how good a piece of software is Axis? This question can be answered by looking at the elements of TCO. Axis has a finite but modest TCO. Manageability is one of the strengths of the Axis/Tomcat platform—J2EE compliance provides this and many other benefits.
Axis can also be integrated into other software products if required. This indicates that Axis can be used as a true software component—further evidence of its flexibility.