ArchiMate is a modeling technique ("language") for describing enterprise architectures. It presents a clear set of concepts within and relationships between architecture domains, and offers a simple and uniform structure for describing the contents of these domains.

Services

Services play a central role in the relationship between domains. Service orientation supports developments such as the service-based network economy and ICT integration with Web services.

These examples already show that services of a very different nature and granularity can be distinguished: they can be provided by organizations to their customers, by applications to business processes, or by technological facilities (e.g., communication networks) to applications.

Layers

A layered view provides a natural way to look at service-oriented models. The higher layers use services that are provided by the lower layers. ArchiMate distinguishes three main layers:

1. The Business layer offers products and services to external customers, which are realized in the organization by business processes performed by business actors and roles.
2. The Application layer supports the business layer with application services which are realized by (software) application components.
3. The Technology layer offers infrastructural services (e.g., processing, storage and communication services) needed to run applications, realized by computer and communication hardware and system software.

Benefits

The main benefits of ArchiMate for modeling your enterprise architectures are:

• It is an international, vendor-independent standard of The Open Group, liberating you from the lock-in of vendor-specific tools and frameworks. There is active support from the ArchiMate Forum of The Open Group.
• Its well-founded concepts and models provide precision. It helps you get away from the 'fuzzy pictures' image of architecture.
• It is a lean and simple language. It contains just enough concepts for modeling enterprise architecture and is not bloated to include everything possible. Its uniform structure makes it easy to learn and apply.
• It has clear links to existing approaches for specific architecture areas such as software or business processes. Several concepts in ArchiMate have deliberately been borrowed from other languages such as UML or BPMN, to provide an easy bridge.
• It does not prescribe a way of working, but it is easily combined with existing methods such as TOGAF.
• It has been tried and tested by many different user organizations and is supported by numerous consultancies and software tools.

Reference:

http://www.archimate.org/