Look for SOA related content on OTN here: Service Oriented Architecture solutions.

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.
Apart from an IT driven need, there are two other reasons for companies to use SOA as their architecture of choice. One is a strategic choice for Business Process Management (BPM) to control and improve the way business is done in an organization. The other reason is more bottom up: a department in a company might need to optimize a specific process to be able to meet market demands or specific regulations that keep changing in a timely manner. In both cases SOA is an important facilitator to make it possible to automate and improve processes and to gather the statistics needed to know what to improve.

Conceptual questions on SOA