Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged as a key strategy for IT and
line-of-business executives to jointly enhance business performance and
agility in today's intense corporate climate. Using the SOA methodology,
business applications are built as an assembly of loosely coupled pieces of
business functionality, commonly referred to as services. These services are
published, consumed, and combined with other applications over a shared
services network, which is often highly distributed within and across
enterprise boundaries.
Service-oriented development of distributed applications is increasingly
common as businesses seek to build and reuse services and service-based
processes in new ways to improve performance and gain competitive advantage.
Gartner Group has... (more)