Despite the slow descent into irrelevance of SOA and its core standards, several of its ancillary standards remain steadfastly alive and in some cases are growing in relevance. In particular, SAML is gaining steam thanks in large part to the explosive adoption of SaaS.
SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), now on its second major version, was most commonly associated with efforts by the Liberty Alliance (long since defunct and absorbed into the Kantara Initiative) to federate authentication and authorization across the web. The «big deal» with SAML was that it was easily supported by the browser. Of course when it was introduced there were few services enterprises felt needed federation with corporate systems and thus despite the energy surrounding the project it was largely ineffective at producing the desired results.