BANGALORE, INDIA: Utilizing technology more effectively makes it possible for businesses to address many of the challenges they face everyday to improve commercial performance, increase business up-time, raise output per employee, improve customer service and satisfaction, reduce business and security risks, cut operational costs, comply with multiple regulations and keep employees happy and motivated.

One of the keys to ensure that business needs are met by IT is a well-aligned service-oriented architecture (SOA). In simple terms SOA is an architectural style for building software applications that use services available in a network such as the Web. SOA also defines and provisions the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes. These functions are loosely coupled with the operating systems and programming languages underlying the applications.

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are radically transforming the way business works. More and more companies are considering an SOA approach to their software infrastructures so much so that Gartner reports that "SOA" is the most widely used search term on their website.

On Google, a search for "SOA" turns up 24,600,000 matches. For enterprises everywhere SOA is a critical initiative — with tremendous potential to help companies address today's greatest business challenges. Organisations embracing SOA will find themselves far ahead in the ability to compete and succeed.

And SOA is becoming a much discussed boardroom topic across the world. In India, SOA is emerging as an effective services-based approach bridging the gap between businesses and IT. SOA has become the architecture for thinking about and building the blueprint for next-generation dynamic IT.

The industry is seeing a lot of traction for SOA across all verticals including telecom, BFSI and government.