As many organizations recognize that legacy application design and implementation have led to applications that are costly to operate and maintain, hard to change, and rely on a dwindling set of skills, service-oriented architecture (SOA) may very well become the basis for their future computer architecture.

Organizations are asking themselves three important questions:

1. Since I hear different things, what exactly is SOA, anyway?
2. If I use it, how is it going to help my organization eliminate cost, increase agility, deal with dwindling legacy skill sets, and address compliance?
3. Given that it has value, how do I get there?

This white paper answers these three questions.