Why SOA?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture

 

Designing and building infrastructure sevices to support coarse-grained, loosely coupled, and standards-based services enables IT to be transform itself as the business requires. IT can then proactively or responsively deliver global solutions, with reduced application and infrastructure complexity, increased reuse of business services, and service orchestration capabilities.

 

http://www.soablueprint.com/whitepapers/SOAPGPart1.pdf