Robert Marcus discusses emerging distributed computing architectures and the role of service-oriented architecture (SOA). He outlines how SOA has evolved from pre-SOA siloed enterprises to current enterprise SOA using web services within silos. Emerging architectures include everything as a service models like cloud computing, web 2.0 approaches, event-driven architectures, and mobile/pervasive services. These extensions integrate SOA, web services, and virtualized infrastructure to provide scalable services.