Businesses are demanding innovative new ways of operation, to proactively become and remain competitive in today's marketplace. Great attention is being paid to the flexibility factor. To achieve maximum agility, Information Technology needs to enable, rather than impede businesses in that goal.

• Promote interoperability
  Services and applications designed and developed will be technology independent

• Allow just-in-time integration
  Application built will be able to bound dynamically at runtime. Dynamic service discovery and invocation (publish, find, bind) and message-oriented collaboration yield applications with looser coupling, enabling just-in-time integration of new applications and services that are self-configuring, adaptive and robust with fewer points of failure

• Reduce complexity by encapsulation
  System complexity is reduced when application designers are shielded from implementation details of the services they are invoking. This allows virtual enterprises to link their heterogeneous systems, for example in merger situations, the resulting enterprise must integrate disparate IT systems and business processes, a Service-Oriented Architecture would greatly facilitate a seamless integration between these systems. New services can be created and dynamically published and discovered without disrupting the existing environment

• Is flexible and scalable
  Different implementation of the same application and/or service will be possible at runtime

• Enable interoperability of legacy systems
  By exposing legacy applications as services, investments in legacy systems are extended, rather than requiring a full-scale system rewrite

• Maximize investment in applications and infrastructures by optimizing existing IT resources to meet current and future business need

• Reduce development time and cost of new applications by empowering IT staff with new set of tools that allows for faster solution delivery

• Minimize the duplication of effort, as established application modules representing business logic will be available for reuse, in the form of Web Services, as needed in new developments

• Develop and deploy distributed, loosely-coupled applications that support business operations

• Minimize the cost, effort and risk of adapting to changing information needs

• Concentrate resources on developing employees' business knowledge and perspective rather than spending enormous time and money on supporting multiple independent, disconnected applications

• Develop Federated Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services Models that represent real-life business processes.

• Develop Web Services that are scaleable and significantly easier to deploy and manage using standard protocols

• Enable sharing of information in real-time

• Define and develop reusable service-base, trusted components that can integrate easily across many applications and infrastructures