Today, your IT department must adapt as fast as business can, if not faster, and even anticipate change. By deploying a standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA), you can increase flexibility and control your costs. SOA goes beyond the common concept of Web services and provides an enterprise infrastructure and approach that achieves optimal business results within heterogeneous landscapes.

SOA allows you to create new applications on top of existing enterprise solutions, increasing the value of your current systems and automating new processes. With SOA, you can:

• Quickly adapt business processes – Service-oriented architecture enables you to separate the interface and process definition from the underlying application. This results in faster implementations and more cost-effective upgrades, deployed as needed and without the business interruptions of "big-bang" approaches.
• Attract new customers – With service-oriented architecture, you can take advantage of Web services to deliver core competencies to new customer segments – while reducing IT costs and increasing efficiency.
• Out-task – Service-oriented architecture allows you to connect to external partners, enabling you to access expert services, reduce costs and asset liabilities, and focus on your core competencies – all while retaining visibility and control into critical processes.
• Extend and automate your value network – Service-oriented architecture allows you to model and automate the terms of a business relationship, so you can extend business models and value chains with optimum speed and transparency.
• Innovate – Most significantly, service-oriented architecture enables SAP partners and customers to deploy innovative solutions that take advantage of existing systems. With SOA, you can run new processes on top of existing applications.