Implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has the potential to offer tremendous long-lasting benefits to the enterprise. First, it reduces cost by offering a smarter, better way of developing applications by turning both existing and new functionality into reusable services.

The second SOA promise relates to composite applications that let developers leverage pieces of existing functionality and data that may be locked in independent applications and combine them to rapidly produce new business services or applications. For example, a bank may have data on a specific customer in the retail banking, home mortgage, and student loan branches. With customer information siloed by product, it becomes difficult if not impossible to upsell or cross-sell intelligently.