In today's competitive global markets, companies are under pressure to achieve high performance through improved productivity, faster time to market, greater flexibility and a more effective workforce. Achieving these goals requires them to make more effective use of IT—posing huge challenges for CIOs to deliver simpler, more flexible systems at a lower cost of ownership. This must be accomplished despite the fact that corporate IT systems are heterogeneous, with multiple products across multiple platforms.

InCase believes that SOA holds the key to meeting these challenges—a view shared by many of the leading analysts. SOA is a services-based approach for designing and building flexible IT solutions, easily combining legacy and new technologies. It enables business process components to be assembled and orchestrated efficiently and rapidly, giving businesses the agility to respond to changing business conditions and delivering distinctive business services. For internal IT organizations, it enables simpler systems that are cheaper to run, can be modified easily and integrate better with other platforms.

In this way, SOA provides for success in today's business conditions while also enabling the flexibility required to sustain that success into the future—a key driver of high performance.