What is the value proposition of SOA? It is indeed an old topic, and seems no need to touch it as SOA has already been in the corporate circle for a number of years. However, just very recently I have heard of a few rather confusing arguments, such as SOA is for interoperability, or SOA is for business data management and etc.
From my humble perceptive, I believe there are two major values that SOA can bring us. One is to achieve business & IT agility and flexibility. The intent of SOA is to achieve a better alignment between the business and the IT worlds in a way that makes both more agile. Any company must stay very competitive in the highly demanding market. As a result, companies have to constantly modify/adapt its business model and, consequently, business rules. Historically, an organization IT department/group was always lack of on-demand capabilities to support very dynamical business environment, and was slow to respond the business requirement changes. But now, SOA is promising us that the marriage of business and IT can make business more dynamical and, eventually, more competitive.
Another major value of SOA is to provide reuse and sharing of services. IT industry had been widely replying on products and tools. A product is hardly reusable. But services have reuse characteristics. Just taking a simple analogical example, AC unit is a product; it can be installed, but difficult to be re-used by your neighbor (if the unit is installed at your home). However, AC service can be reused anywhere; either you or your neighbor can buy the AC service and use it. Same for SOA, it is to make repeatable business activities as services that can be (re)used widely. In addition, it can be re-arranged easily to meet the different business requirements. To realize SOA, of course, we need to rely on the products and tools where different vendors are trying hard to sell.
(note added on 5/31: there is a good overview article about SOA at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-soa-design1)
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