Back in 2002 Vinod Khosla, one of the elite of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur community (co-founded Sun Microsystems among others), wrote a white paper called the Real-Time Enterprise
At the same time I also wrote a similar paper entitled Building an On Demand Enterprise, which was based around the same principles. We both described utilizing a ‘loosely coupled’ and federated business model via the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), to build more agile organizational structures.
These service architectures were achieved by integration technologies and standards like SOAP, which as we zoom forward ten years we can see still persists in terms of the underlying model but has now been replaced by REST, a more web-oriented approach suitable to the new Cloud world.