Service oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural pattern which requires all

exposed functionality to be published as services in a platform-independent

manner. These services can be consumed by other applications.
To successfully utilize SOA on an enterprise level, you need to consider:
All interfaces need to be clearly defined and stable and to make use of global data
types they should avoid superfluous transformations caused by technically different
definitions of semantically identical information.
To establish additional reliability, all services must follow clearly defined
communication and behavioral patterns. For example Clients need to know
whether services are synchronous or asynchronous, whether they return an answer,
how they handle exceptions, which security policy they use etc.
The overview
A service in SOA is best explained as Structure, Typing (as in Object Orientated and
system design) and behavior.
Best understood as Message Based Integration.
A Service Object gives access to business object and business functionality.
A Service Object uses a Service Interface.
A Service has a related signature and message types, which control the structure
of the operation.
General categorization of Services
A service can do a Query operation
A service can do an Action operation
A service can do a CRUD (Create Retrieve Update Delete) operation
The Service can be Synchronous or Asynchronous.
Basic Summary
Essentially SAP SOA can be seen as a set of standardizations of interfaces. For
example one could move from having 3 different mapping rules and possible
interfaces for a single business process, for example a price and availability check,
to a single standardized SOA service.