The application landscape is in constant flux. More and more organizations are embarking on large scale Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) projects to build a more flexible enterprise application landscape.

In the days of monolithic application systems, software evaluation and selection used to be much simpler than in today's increasingly integrated environment.

Today, businesses are moving away from building or acquiring large, monolithic application systems. Using a service-oriented application design, application software is broken down into its constituent parts, that is into smaller, more modular application components or services. These application services make use of infrastructure software that has also been decomposed into discrete system services. All of these discrete services can be deployed across any number of physical machines that are connected to the Internet. This modular service approach provides great flexibility in terms of system design.