Service Oriented Architecture is such a marketing buzzword that it's being applied to just about every product imaginable these days. We use the term to describe multiple small, single-purpose, stateless, horizontally scalable services that share nothing but cooperatively work together to deliver high performance and often (in aggregate) highly complex capabilities to users in a cost effective manner. Hardware is generally inexpensive off the shelf commodity machines yet the system is deployed in such a manner that it is especially resilient and highly scalable. This is to contrast with large monolithic systems that comprise most client-server and enterprise applications.

Proteus Technologies has utilized SOA (and variants such as Resource Oriented Architecture) as an effective technique for delivering Web Services as well as augment existing monolithic systems such as large BI and accounting systems. Often certain new capabilities cannot easily be added to monolithic systems because their inherent technology is simply not capable of implementing the requirement or deployment of such a capability will result in unacceptable performance degradation of the host system. By selectively integrating with the existing system but implementing the new capability on top of an SOA platform, we can expand the existing system's capabilities without having to replace the entire existing infrastructure. This allows the customer to evolve into a new environment rather than undergo an expensive and painful revolutionary effort.