The whole of the IT world seems to be talking about service oriented architecture (SOA), but many people are unclear about what it means in practice. To understand SOA, it helps to know how it was developed and the needs it is designed to address.
According to analyst firm Ovum, SOA is the latest in a series of approaches to provide organisations with a technology framework for designing and integrating reusable software components.
Since the 1990s, when people realised the inefficiencies of running monolithic applications on ever larger and more expensive mainframe hardware, there has been a demand for different computer systems to communicate in a standard way. Networking protocols such as TCP/IP have enabled computers to share information via a network cable. What users wanted was a straightforward way for applications to do something useful with this information in a controlled and managed way.
