A few software terms

As a Engagement manager, I have used the below terms quite frequently, but not being a core techie, I had not known the clear text book definition ;). Here they are (thanks to wikipedia):

Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) [pronounced "sō-uh" or "es-ō-ā"] expresses a perspective of software architecture that defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of the business processes and software users. Resources on a network[1] in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation.[1]

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is defined as the uses of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.

Three-tier is a client-server architecture in which the user interface, functional process logic ("business rules"), data storage and data access are developed and maintained as independent modules, most often on separate platforms.

Distributed computing is a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network. Distributed computing is a type of parallel processing. But the latter term is most commonly used to refer to processing in which different parts of a program run simultaneously on two or more processors that are part of the same computer.

Web service[1] is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Web services are frequently just application programming interfaces (API) that can be accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services.