What is SOA?

Service Oriented Architecture. In SOA you create an abstract layer that your applications use to access various "services" and can aggregate the services. These services could be databases, web services, message queues or other sources.

The Service Layer provides a way to access these services that the applications do not need to know how the access is done. For example, to get a full customer record, I might need to get data from a SGL Server database, a web service and a message queue. The Service layer hides this from the calling application.

All the application knows is that it asked for a full customer record. It doesn't know what system or systems it came from or how it was retrieved.