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 coined the term service-oriented business application (SOBA) to refer to a service-based approach to building distributed applications.
