Today, service-oriented architectures ( SOAs ) are being heralded by industry analysts and software vendors as the only viable way to overcome the complexities involved in creating agile business systems. These software structures offer great promise for accelerating deployment of new applications and capabilities, streamlining business-critical processes, reducing costs, and enabling organizations to increase their return on investment from an accumulation of diverse systems and communication technologies.

To better understand SOAs and how they can be effectively employed, it helps to understand the principles on which they are designed. It also helps to become acquainted with tools that are helping enable application developers and integrators to quickly and cost-effectively make SOAs a reality within their specific organizations.