Close your eyes. Relax. And let's daydream a bit. Imagine a product that would make your business more agile, reduce risk, make it possible to serve your customers better, and let you reuse valuable IT assets. Sounds like nirvana, right?

That's the promise of service-oriented architectures, which give companies the ability to turn large, monolithic, inflexible applications into hundreds, even thousands of small, flexible apps that can be shared among employees and with outside suppliers and partners.