Most organizations today have internal applications that span across different systems, networks, and technologies. These applications would provide more value to customers if only the data that they manage were exposed. In the past, this was often difficult due to the inability of systems to communicate with one other. However with Web service standards in place for several years now, services are finally gaining acceptance throughout the industry. Consequently, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have finally come to fruition as companies start to rethink how they build enterprise applications.
In the past, organizations typically approached large-scale development efforts as one monolithic project. This was often due to constraints of the underlying technology as well as the difficulty of making systems communicate. If applications did communicate, they were invariably tightly coupled.
