Adopting an SOA design philosophy can reduce costs while making IT more nimble. Once, during a tour of a modern vehicle building plant, Eric Newcomer was startled to come upon an ageing VAX -- the original minicomputer -- controlling some machinery.

Nowhere is the power of preservation more evident than in SOA, the design philosophy usually implemented using Web services.

A clever SOA designer, for example, could create a Web service to talk to the VAX. Then other applications could drive its machinery using the service as an interface. After an initial up-front investment, SOAs help IT departments control costs by reusing old code and meet business needs faster by assembling new functions from modular parts.