How do service-oriented architectures really benefit business?

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) is a software architecture that defines the use of loosely-coupled software services to support the requirements of business processes and application users. The aim is to make IT systems more responsive to ever-changing business requirements at a lower cost than traditional approaches. Experience shows that benefits include improved agility, lower costs, better alignment of the business and IT, user adoption and support for business innovation. An SOA application sees applications as building blocks for services provided to end users. This allows re-use of applications across the enterprise. The most commonly-used components of an SOA are technologies such as web services, portal frameworks, application servers, integration frameworks and security frameworks. The desire to reduce cost by re-using what an enterprise already has, and also increase flexibility by reducing the time to implement a new service, has led enterprises to adopt SOAs.