SOA has rapidly seized the momentum and center stage because it is seen as the key for Enterprises to achieve Business agility, improved quality of service, lowered total cost of ownership and to align Business with technology. SOA represents a unique and rare opportunity to bring IT and Business together. However, this opportunity implies an evolution and often an organizational change, especially in the role of IT within the organization and in the way IT and Business work together. This seminar starts with examples of popular Business strategies, explains how SOA can enable them and foster a better alignment between Business requirements and IT deliverables. It gives you insight into the key organizational challenges that IT Managers face with the adoption of SOA and how to master them through efficient governance. Next, the seminar discusses the key standards that one should consider when implementing services and it outlines the important aspects of Enterprise Architecture that have to be addressed in order to make SOA projects successful. This includes defining a loosely coupled architecture and proper separation into service layers, as well as a comparison of conventional Web Services based and RESTful architectures. The seminar then drills down into the major aspects of application architecture, for example how SOA enables new types of clients, the characteristics of orchestration, application, and infrastructure services, and it maps standards to the layers of the application architecture. Furthermore, the seminar will help you understand how SOA can be applied to integration initiatives within your company, in particular through Service Oriented Integration (SOI). In this context the concept of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is introduced. The seminar concludes with an overview of today’s predominant platforms for building and deploying new Business applications (Java EE and .NET, as well as open source tools), examining these platforms in terms of their support for SOA.