The following guiding principles define the ground rules for development, maintenance, and usage of the SOA[6]

* Reuse, granularity, modularity, composability, componentization, and interoperability
* Compliance to standards (both common and industry-specific)
* Services identification and categorization, provisioning and delivery, and monitoring and tracking

The following specific architectural principles for design and service definition focus on specific themes that influence the intrinsic behaviour of a system and the style of its design:

Enterprise architects believe that SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and cost-effectively to changing market conditions[5]

. This style of architecture promotes reuse at the macro(service) level rather than micro(classes) level. It can also simplify interconnection to - and usage of - existing IT (legacy) assets.

SOA Practitioners Guide: Why Services-Oriented Architecture? provides a high-level summary on SOA.

* Reduce development time and cost—SOA services are easily reused and can be rapidly assembled into new, composite applications
* Lower maintenance costs—Reusable services reduce the number and internal complexity of IT services
* Higher quality services—Increased service reuse creates higher-quality services through multiple testing cycles from different service consumers
* Lower integration costs—Standardized services know how to work together, enabling disparate applications to quickly and easily connect

In order to efficiently use an SOA, one must meet the following requirements:

* Interoperability between different systems and programming languages
The most important basis for a simple integration between applications on different platforms is a communication protocol, which is available for most systems and programming languages.
* Clear and unambiguous description language

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Leading companies are tackling the complexity of their application and IT environments with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which facilitates the development of modular business services that can be easily integrated and reused—creating a truly flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure. With an SOA approach, your IT organization will focus more resources and budget on innovation and on delivering new business services.