Although the idea of SOA has been around well over a decade, a new generation of infrastructure software technology is emerging that is addressing the cost and complexity shortcomings that were not possible in earlier generations. Previously disparate technologies are now pre- integrated into a consistent enterprise application platform, while also conforming to a best-practice service-oriented architecture for IT. In this new environment, the SOA is natively built on industry standards, promotes reuse and, for the first time, allows non-specialist developers to rapidly become productive developers.

Companies can now realistically achieve their business goals by implementing a best-practice service-oriented IT architecture as the foundation of their future success. Now, more than ever, IT can be a strategic business asset, along side other key assets such as employees and intellectual property. In SOA-enabled environments, enterprises can begin to bridge the fundamental gap that has existed between business requirements and IT capabilities.

• Faster time to market - The core philosophy of SOA inherently promotes reuse for development and integration teams. With reuse of services and components, new applications can be quickly assembled to respond to changing market conditions or business demand. With the shortening of project time frames comes a faster response rate to changing business requirements.
• Operational efficiencies - Most packaged enterprise applications perform well in streamlining processes related to standard tasks. However, the performance rapidly deteriorates while automating and streamlining customized processes that encompass multiple enterprise applications. The process is difficult, time-consuming and expensive to implement and maintain. SOA virtually eliminates these inter-application complexity barriers. It allows IT to more rapidly change to the needs of the business so that IT can create a culture and an infrastructure of business adaptability. In other words, SOA enables "IT that fits the business."
• Faster, less expensive application integration and B2B integration - Implementing a traditional packaged application integration solution is expensive and complex, often requiring extensive manual coding for deployment purposes. An SOA framework provides native support for runtime deployment of services across the network and it dramatically reduces the overall costs of application integration and deployment by automating these time-consuming processes. It also allows extension of integration across business boundaries.