Service oriented software architectures will form the core of operational enterprise IT landscapes in the future. This contribution starts with an introduction of the state of the art in service oriented architectures. A concrete case study identifies central requirements that are not satisfied by these architectures so far. The authors argue that semantically rich descriptions of services are essential to tap the full potential of service oriented architectures in enterprise environments. This regards matchmaking and binding of services, integration of new services as well as the costefficient development of added value services by composing semantically described basic services. This paper introduces a semantic service platform that implements dynamic matchmaking, composition and binding of semantically described services. Finally its functionality and possible application scenarios are outlined.