Utilizing technology more effectively makes it possible for businesses to address many of the challenges they face everyday to improve commercial performance, increase business up-time, raise output per employee, improve customer service and satisfaction, reduce business and security risks, cut operational costs, comply with multiple regulations and keep employees happy and motivated. One of the keys to ensure that business needs are met by IT is a well-aligned service-oriented architecture (SOA). In simple terms SOA is an architectural style for building software applications that use services available in a network such as the Web. SOA also defines and provisions the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes. These functions are loosely coupled with the operating systems and programming languages underlying the applications.
