Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a current technology rage. Its goal is to make I.T. integration faster, more effective, and cheaper, while using existing tools. If you hear the letters "SOA"' and think somebody is spelling "soap," odds are that you're in finance and not information technology.
SOA, or service-oriented architecture, is one of the hottest buzzwords in I.T. today, and it's been gaining traction steadily as an open industry standard that vendors are anxious to incorporate into their applications. It's an integration framework that offers a series of benefits: It helps applications talk to each other; it simplifies integration of disparate systems after a merger; and it saves (or even eliminates) a lot of programming time and costs.
