O’Reilly (Sayad Hashimi) has an explanation of what has become a buzzword in the context of web services.
Even though we have decades of experience in software development, we have yet to solve the mysteries of software complexity. As complexity grows, researchers find more innovative ways to answer the call. SOA, in combination with web services, is the latest answer. Application integration is one of the major issues companies face today; SOA can solve that. System availability, reliability, and scalability continue to bite companies today; SOA addresses these issues. Given today’s requirements, SOA is the best scalable solution for application architecture.