In today's competitive global markets, companies are under pressure to achieve high performance through improved productivity, faster time to market, greater flexibility and a more effective workforce. Achieving these goals requires them to make more effective use of IT—posing huge challenges for CIOs to deliver simpler, more flexible systems at a lower cost of ownership. This must be accomplished despite the fact that corporate IT systems are heterogeneous, with multiple products across multiple platforms.

Accenture believes that SOA holds the key to meeting these challenges—a view shared by many of the leading analysts. SOA is a services-based approach for designing and building flexible IT solutions, easily combining legacy and new technologies. It enables business process components to be assembled and orchestrated efficiently and rapidly, giving businesses the agility to respond to changing business conditions and delivering distinctive business services. For internal IT organizations, it enables simpler systems that are cheaper to run, can be modified easily and integrate better with other platforms.

In this way, SOA provides for success in today's business conditions while also enabling the flexibility required to sustain that success into the future—a key driver of high performance.

Accenture harnesses deep industry and business process knowledge with consummate ability to craft technology solutions that enable high performance.

Accenture has a demonstrable track record in helping clients implement new technologies and architectures to help clients on their journey toward high performance. We are thus perfectly positioned to guide our clients through the service-oriented architecture (SOA) journey:

• Technology Thought Leadership: From innovation to what works, nobody understands how to use technology to better business advantage than Accenture. Our technology vision is driven by Accenture Technology Labs, our technology research and development organization.

• Intellectual Capital: We can provide both a road map and a full suite of methods, tools and architectures.

• Skills: We have 900 architects with deep SOA skills; a 12,500-strong SOA community of practice across all industry groups; and an established global systems integration team.

• Global Delivery Network: Our 40,000 professionals spread across over 30 facilities across the globe enable the perfect match of skills and price.

• Technology Partnerships: Accenture's drive to help clients unleash the power of service-oriented architecture (SOA) to achieve high performance is greatly strengthened by its alliances with market-leading and emerging vendors in this field. As part of this drive, Accenture is launching innovation centers at the headquarters of key alliances, giving clients an unparalleled opportunity to see SOA in action.

Find out what Accenture specialists are saying about SOA's potential to enable high performance in diverse industries.

Accenture can help clients transform, develop and implement a complete service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy:

• Accenture Business Process Management Offering
• Accenture SOA Reference Architecture
• Accenture SOA Diagnostic
• Industry Solutions
• Architectures and Tools

Accenture's drive to help clients unleash the power of service-oriented architecture (SOA) to achieve high performance is greatly strengthened by its alliances with market-leading and emerging vendors in this field.