Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a business-driven software architecture that increases adaptability, flexibility, openness, and cost-efficiency. With SOA, organizations can:

• Compose applications and enable business processes rapidly using enterprise services
• Improve the reuse of software to become more agile in responding to change

Industry standards are critical to SOA as they enable SAP and non-SAP applications and services to interoperate, working together as seamlessly as possible without adding unnecessary cost and risk to the business.

Benefits of industry standards occur only if you take a comprehensive approach that places equal importance on:

• Business semantics standards – Define the information flowing through and between enterprise applications.
• Technology standards – Enable systems running enterprise applications to more easily connect and communicate. Log-in required.
• Open source – Provide SAP customers with a choice of technology platforms to use. Log-in required.

Visit SAP Developer Network (SDN) to participate in the discussion around industry standards and service-oriented architecture.