SOA

Service-oriented Architecure is an architectural and design style and paradigm in software engineering. Its primary intent is to align business with IT to create an on-demand or more flexible IT infrastructure. SOA is all about services, reuse, integration and open standards. SOA defines a different approach to software engineering. It involves what is called SOA Governance which is a model which defines the processes and policies for managing and overseeing the SOA structure. It measures how the business's current state is compared to it's business goals. SOA is usually, but not always, implemented using web services.