What is SOA?

Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural paradigm and discipline that may be used to build infrastructures enabling those with needs (consumers) and those with capabilities (providers) to interact via services across disparate domains of technology and ownership. Services act as the core facilitator of electronic data interchanges yet require additional mechanisms
in order to function. Several new trends in the computer industry rely upon SOA as the enabling foundation. These include the automation of Business Process Management (BPM), composite applications (applications that aggregate multiple services to function), and the multitude of new architecture and design patterns generally referred to as Web 2.0.