SOA in itself is not new. The concept has been here for a while. What makes it appealing to the people is that we have standards now, standards that have been proven again and again. The integration of these standards into the architecture are making SOA ready for prime time. The reason why it is important and why companies are interested in it is because what we done over the years, is that we’ve learned how to run our business on a collection of applications. We are moving from the application paradigm to a services paradigm. Now we can more tightly integrate our underlying technical infrastructure to the business process whereas before we had to conform to the way the applications were designed to function. So, that allows one to integrate strategic changes into their business a lot quicker, that allows one to bring products and services to the market a lot quicker, and also allows one to customise in a way that makes them unique and give an edge over their competitors.
