The document discusses Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). It defines SOA as a collection of services that communicate with each other. These communication units are called services. Communication can involve simple data passing or coordinating an activity between two or more services. The document also discusses the evolution of SOA including the roles of XML, web services, and how SOA is defined with service requestors, providers, and registries. Key characteristics of SOA are also outlined such as being service-based, specification-based, combinable, reusable, and more. Past architectures like client-server and distributed architectures are also compared to SOA.