SOA, or service-oriented architecture, can be just another entry in the mushrooming jumble of acronyms and alphabet soups business technology users must digest. The world of e-commerce is undergoing a transition toward greater use of SOA. Its proponents claim that SOA holds real promise to drive further adoption and greater efficiency for e-commerce.
SOA can be a powerful asset for IT organizations, enabling them to unite disparate systems using well-defined, common standard interfaces. Do not view SOA as a new technology, however. It is a flexible business process that can help adopters cost-effectively deliver increased value to their customers.
Rather than throwing investment money into "rip and replace" strategies that involve complete software rewrites, application modernization with SOA enables organizations to reuse valuable business logic within applications that can seamlessly integrate with newer, Web-based systems.
Source: CRM Buyer