my take on service oriented architecture

if implemented optimally, soa can lead to huge efficiency gains for a wide variety of businesses. certain criteria must be met for this to happen. it is imperative that the services involved be loosely coupled. by design, loosely coupled software components easily lend themselves to reuse -- which is key in gaining efficiency. creating services that aren't loosely coupled defeats the notion of soa because such services can't be easily combined in an ad-hoc way to solve business problems. so, having loosely coupled services is the key to easier soa implementation. it's also imperative that such services scale well as individual units. the number of clients that a particular service may need to serve in the future cannot be determined with absolute certainty. thus, it is imperative that any such service be designed to easily scale in order to serve a potentially unlimited number of clients. finally, such services should be designed with platform interoperability in mind. it cannot be determined with absolute certainty that such a service would not be useful in serving any number of clients on disparate platforms.