SOA Service Oriented Architecture Solutions : BT
SOA Service Oriented Architecture Solution : BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. BEA® Enterprise 360o, the industry’s most advanced SOA-based offering, is a comprehensive approach to delivering business results that includes technology, professional services, best practices, and world-class partners.
Customers rely on BEA AquaLogic®, WebLogic®, and Tuxedo® product lines to reduce IT complexity and leverage existing resources, while improving cost structures and growing new revenue streams with new services. Information about how BEA enables customers to build a Liquid EnterpriseTM that transforms their business and creates competitive advantage can be found at bea.com.
Source: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=IDC_P15270&pageType=EVENTSPONSOR
SOA Service Oriented Architecture 2008 UK
Local Conference
Mar 11, 2008
London, United Kingdom
Event Details
The driving principle behind Service Oriented Architecture SOA is the ability to dynamically deliver applications required by the users that need them in a flexible and cost-effective manner.
Many organisations have successfully completed small-scale SOA pilot projects, but these have highlighted a number of business management challenges that must be addressed before wider-scale adoption can be started. Specifically:
The benefits of SOA are clear for the IT department, but for enterprise SOA to succeed business buy-in is required. As a CIO you are the bridge between the business and IT, but how do you translate this seemingly technical message for a business audience?
IDC's 2008 Service-Oriented Architecture Conference will examine the hottest topics, including:
The conference will enable end users to make knowledgeable decisions about where and when to use SOA, and will include end-user case studies and presentations from leading vendors and IDC analysts.
Who Should Attend
If you are responsible for developing and implementing your organisation's IT strategy this conference will provide you with the tools and information you need to implement a companywide SOA solution that deploys agile, manageable and secure technology. Typically, IDC's SOA Conference is attended by:
FREE* attendance for the first 100 end-user registrations received
For all subsequent end-user registrations and for participants from other organisations the fee is EUR550.
If registering as an end user, enter "SOAWB" in the special promotional code box.
Registration includes conference participation, documentation and access to presentation material, plus all refreshments and lunch. Please note that the fee does not include overnight accommodation.
We are only able to accept up to three attendees from each company due to limited space at each event. If we have already received registrations from three members of your company we will inform you as soon as possible in order for you to discuss attendance internally.
Service Oriented Architecture SOA Best Practice
The Cape Clear Developer web site provides many resources to assist you throughout the lifecycle of your SOA projects. There are many articles of use to SOA architects as well as developers. This page introduces many of these articles and places them within the context of your SOA projects.
Getting Started
If you’re just getting started, read our Concepts article for a brief introduction to Service-Oriented Architecture and how you can start building services using the Enterprise Service Bus. Still need to be convinced? Read ESB and BPEL: Changing the Rules of Integration to see how your SOA is going to change the way you approach integration projects. Now that you’re convinced you need to build a SOA, be careful about those in your organization tempted to stick with the old practices, but apply a SOA badge. In short, Beware of Shortcuts on the Road to a Service-Oriented Architecture.
IT Governance has become increasingly important as should be an important part of your SOA strategy. Governance: the new word for Best Practice explains the needs for governance and its relationship to the Cape Clear product set.
Design
The most visible aspect of the services in your SOA is the interface. A significant part of the design will culminate in the creation of these interfaces. The general issues such as granularity and loose coupling have already been introduced in the Concepts article mentioned above. Some concrete examples of interface design, and in particular the influence of BPEL on your interfaces, are presented in How BPEL and SOA Are Changing Web Services Development.
The requirement to deploy new versions of a service is something that needs to be considered as part of the design process. A strategy for versioning Web services is described in Service versioning in a SOA. The issue of achieving compatible interfaces using XML Schemas is addressed in Avoid XML Schema Wildcards For Web Service Interfaces. Each component within the ESB performs a specific role. Ensuring that these components are used in the appropriate way is an important part of the design. Spot the mistakes - Two things you shouldn’t do with BPEL illustrates this point with a simple BPEL code snippet.
Integrate
Much of the functionality in your SOA will be provided by the existing applications. So the initial tasks become a case of "Expose the function currently provided by application X as a Web service". The ESB is particularly powerful in assisting you in doing this. It provides connections to the transports your existing applications use and tools necessary to transform existing message formats to XML. See the Cape Clear ESB Overview for a brief description of the features available to you that assist in this.
Develop
You will find many working examples of the kind of services that you will be developing in our demos and tutorials section. The testing of your SOA in parallel with development is essential. Performance Testing in a SOA outlines the various kinds of testing required.
Deploy
Before going into deployment, the services that make up your SOA need to be able to guarantee high levels of quality of service. The ESB provides many features to facilitate this, but you must ensure that your services have been designed and developed in order to take advantage of these advanced features. Designing Mission Critical Applications presents many recommendations on how you can ensure that your services are Reliable, Available, Scalable and offer high Performance. Services must also be secure; the security capabilities offered by the Cape Clear ESB are described in Security in the Cape Clear ESB. The WS-Security tutorial allows you to see security in action and explains the specifics of applying WS-Security to your services.
Source: http://developer.capeclear.com/soa
SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East will take place on June 23-24, 2008 at The Roosevelt Hotel in New York.
Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have evolved over the past few years out of the original vision of loosely coupled web services replacing constrained, stovepiped applications throughout enterprise IT. Every major enterprise technology vendor today has developed its own SOA strategy, supported by innumerable mid-size companies and start-ups offering specific SOA aspects or entire solutions. This explosive growth in SOA technology is in response to a global demand--IDC estimates that spending on SOA services alone will grow from $8.6 billion to more than $33 billion by 2010.
SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East brings together the best minds in the business to New York for a two-day conference that offers comprehensive coverage of SOA and what it means to enterprise IT today. As Zapthink analyst Jason Bloomberg has noted, "SOA involves rethinking how the business leverages IT in many various ways." Attend SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East and learn from more than 100 speakers about how SOA is transforming business--and the way IT and business managers think about their businesses, processes, and technology.
The colocation of SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East and Virtualization Conference & Expo delivers the most relevant content to IT and business. Conference attendees will be able to choose from four great tracks at this year's event. Mix and match all you want, or slot into your favorite topic for the duration! The tracks include:
• Web 2.0/AJAX and SOA
• Interop Standards and Services
• Real-World SOA
• SOA Technology
• Virtualization
• Specially Selected Hot Topics
A Duo of Power Panels
This year's conference will also feature two Power Panels. Don't miss the SOA/Web 2.0/AJAX Power Panel, and Virtualization Power Panel. The Power Panels are FREE to all attendees, and will be recorded for broadcast by SYS-CON.TV.
Receive a Week's Worth of Education in Two Information-Packed Days!
The best news for this year's conference delegates is that the "Golden Pass" registration now provides full access to all conference sessions.
Additionally, after the conference we will mail you the complete content from all of the conference sessions in convenient DVDs. This on-demand DVD archive set is sold separately for $695. The DVD set includes all sessions from the simultaneous tracks that you can't attend in person.
Source: For more information, please visit http://soaworld2008.com/
Seven Steps to Service Oriented Architecture SOA Adoption Part One: Publish and Orchestrate By: Dave Shaffer
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) facilitates the development of applications as modular business services that can be easily integrated, secured, and administered. Benefits of an SOA approach include more-rapid development, decreased maintenance and change management costs, and improved business visibility. However, achieving these benefits isn't automatic - although many early adopters of SOA have been able to realize its promise fully, others have struggled to find the best architecture and design patterns for this approach.
The SOA model is about asynchronous, loosely coupled, stateless interactions through the use of standard component interfaces and architectures. However, it's often not obvious how this approach should be combined with traditional development practices and patterns such as model-view-controller (MVC) and synchronous and transactional Java or C/C++/C# coding. Likewise, the area of testing is one in which the flexibility of a loosely coupled architecture introduces new complexities (See Figure 1).
This article is the first of a two-part series that will outline the best practices and pitfalls that are starting to emerge for SOA, based on real-world customer implementation experiences. With this series, we hope to enable organizations to consider a few of these concerns earlier in the design process, thereby building on the successes of their predecessors and avoiding some of the mistakes.
Challenges to SOA Adoption
Adopting a SOA involves more than just technology. Organizational issues play a major factor in the success of SOA initiatives. These factors include retraining, business and IT decision-making processes, governance and security. These are always issues whenever a new technology or architecture emerges; however, SOA has unique characteristics that amplify some of these complexities. For example, security has always been important, but a distributed SOA means that more information will be passing over a network as compared with a tightly coupled architecture.
It also means that teams and departments may become more interdependent on each other. If a group is building a risk analysis engine for a development project, that cost is going to be budgeted in that project. But the extra effort of making it a generic service, and publishing, maintaining, and securing it so that other applications can make effective use of it will incur additional development cost and must be explicitly supported by the organization as a whole. Incentives and oversight/governance need to be put in place at the broadest levels possible for a SOA to be more than just an implementation approach for individual projects.
At a purely technical level, developers must approach SOA projects with a different mindset than they have for tightly coupled implementations. Learning to identify the appropriate level of granularity for a service, determining what should be coded in languages like BPEL versus what should be in Java, and becoming comfortable with a new set of design patterns will take some time. Organizations embarking on their first SOA implementations should plan for a certain amount of exploration and refactoring in their schedules. Also, just because SOA and these new standards provide IT with a shiny new hammer doesn't mean that all projects are nails. We've often seen new tools, such as Web Services, asynchronous interfaces, and process languages like BPEL, over-generalized and used for problems they weren't suited for. For example, while we are strong proponents of BPEL, there are things that it isn't appropriate for, such as UI orchestration and highly computational business logic.
Three areas where we've seen companies encounter difficulties when adopting SOA are interoperability, testing, and performance. The nature of the service-oriented world is that it makes interoperability more difficult and more important than it is with traditional three-tier architectures. A major value of a loosely coupled standard service interface model like WSDL is that clients of a service don't need to know what technology is used to implement the service (and vice versa). But this makes for a combinational explosion when testing for interoperability. Similarly, testing SOA applications that interact with many external services is a significant challenge. Troubleshooting and performance tuning are also more complex due to the many different layers that may be involved in a single process or application.
However, all is not lost. If you haven't been scared away from SOA yet, we'll explain how some of the best practices that are starting to emerge for SOA adoption can help address these challenges. These best practices come from working closely with many customers in their initial SOA implementations and have been learned as much from problems and errors ("worst practices") as from successes.
Seven Steps to SOA Adoption
We see the following as the key steps to effective SOA adoption:
) Create a portfolio of services
) Define connectivity and messaging interfaces
) Process orchestration, workflow, and rules
) Rich user interfaces
) Business activity monitoring
) Security and management
) Performance and scalability
We recommend that you not approach these steps in a sequential order. For example, it's very risky to consider performance only at the end of a project, at which point design decisions that affect scalability can be very difficult to change. The best way to use these steps is to apply them all to a thin slice of a project and then iterate through rapidly expanding prototypes as additional functionality is added.
Source: For more information, please visit http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/275111.htm
Service Oriented Architecture SOA Software Positioned in Leaders Quadrant of 2007 Integrated SOA Governance Magic Quadrant
Evaluation Based on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute
Los Angeles, Calif., January 14 , 2008—SOA Software, a leading Integrated SOA Governance Automation vendor, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets, 2007” [1] report. The Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets evaluated 18 vendors and examined the market for SOA governance through a set of integrated technologies.
SOA Software is recognized by its customers for providing enterprise-class, platform-independent, integrated SOA Governance automation solutions. The company’s products provide comprehensive, centralized SOA planning, lifecycle and operational governance automation through a single integrated solution. SOA Software is focused exclusively on enterprise SOA, delivering a fully integrated set of standards-based, high-performance products.
According to Gartner, “Most SOA Governance Technologies are not integrated into one suite but are provided from vey different technology code bases. Policy management and enforcement engines seldom share the same integrated code base as registries and repositories.” [2] In addition, the report states that, “Gartner evaluates technology providers on their ability to convincingly articulate their current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs and competitive forces and how well these map to the Gartner position.” [2]
“We have worked closely with our Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers to define and understand their SOA Governance requirements,” said Eric Pulier, founder and executive chairman of SOA Software. “We have built a set of products that combine to deliver a comprehensive integrated SOA Governance Automation solution that aligns very well with the market’s requirements.”
The Integrated SOA Governance technologies market experienced explosive growth in 2007 as large enterprises continue to accelerate their adoption of SOA and recognized the need for strong SOA governance automation solutions. SOA Software is leading this market as one of the fastest growing companies with the most comprehensive and best integrated product sets. SOA Software’s standards-based Workbench and Service Manager products combine to provide the comprehensive integrated SOA Governance automation solution deployed by the world’s largest organizations to ensure the applicability, security, reliability, performance, and value of their services and SOA.
“SOA Software has executed extremely well on its strategy of providing a comprehensive set of products that enable the governance of enterprise SOA, and has grown very quickly,” said Paul Gigg, chief executive officer of SOA Software, “2007 was an excellent year with outstanding growth, and we expect 2008 to continue this trend.”
SOA Software’s products combine to provide a heterogeneous SOA governance solution. The solution is platform-independent, integrating seamlessly with most common enterprise service platforms to ensure that they are governable. This helps enterprises avoid the pitfalls of self-governed platforms. Workbench delivers policy compliance and validation, uniform policy management and metadata federation with shared, open standards-based governance services for registry, repository, security token management, authorization, PKI, and performance/reliability management. Workbench leverages a single underlying data store and provides a single unified console for all the integrated governance infrastructure services. Service Manager consumes the Workbench services, data store and console, providing a wide range of intermediaries to ensure seamless integration with most common enterprise service platforms including Microsoft .NET, IIS, and BizTalk, IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and AquaLogic, SAP, JBOSS, Tibco, Apache, and others.
[1] Gartner, Inc. “Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets, 2007” by L. Frank Kenney, Daryl C. Plummer, December 31st 2007.
[2] Gartner, Inc. “Citeria for Integrated SOA Governace Technology Sets, 2008” by Daryl C. Plummer , L. Frank Kenney, January 8th 2008.
Register to view the full Gartner report
About the Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2007 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About SOA Software
SOA Software is a leading provider of comprehensive, enterprise-class integrated SOA Governance solutions. SOA Software products provide a comprehensive closed-loop SOA governance solution (Workbench), a high-performance, scalable SOA security, mediation, and management (Service Manager), and a mainframe Web services solution for CICS applications (SOLA). SOA Software products process over 500 million mission critical transactions a month and are used by the largest Fortune 1000 corporations, including Merrill Lynch, Verizon, and Pfizer. For more information, please visit http://www.soa.com .
SOA Software, Workbench, Service Manager, and SOLA are trademarks of SOA Software, Inc.
Source: http://www.soa.com/index.php/section/company_press_detail/soa_software_positioned_in_leaders_quadrant_of_2007_integrated_soa_governan/
Service Oriented Architecture SOA - Using XML with WSDL
WSDL uses XML to define messages. XML has a tagged message format. This is shown in the above figure. The tag
Source: http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/web_services_explained.html
Service Oriented Architecture SOA -Using SOAP
All the messages shown in the above figure are sent using SOAP. (SOAP at one time stood for Simple Object Access Protocol. Now, the letters in the acronym have no particular meaning .) SOAP essentially provides the envelope for sending the Web Services messages. SOAP generally uses HTTP , but other means of connection may be used. HTTP is the familiar connection we all use for the Internet. In fact, it is the pervasiveness of HTTP connections that will help drive the adoption of Web Services. More on SOAP and Messaging (new window).
The next figure provides more detail on the messages sent using Web Services. At the left of the figure is a fragment of the WSDL sent to the directory. It shows a CustomerInfoRequest that requires the customer's account to object information. Also shown is the CustomerInfoResponse that provides a series of items on customer including name, phone, and address items.
Source: http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/web_services_explained.html
Service Oriented Architecture SOA - Using Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)
The directory shown in the above figure could be a UDDI registry. The UDDI registry is intended to eventually serve as a means of "discovering" Web Services described using WSDL . The idea is that the UDDI registry can be searched in various ways to obtain contact information and the Web Services available for various organizations. How much "discovery" will be used in the early days of Web Services is open to discussion. Nevertheless, even without the discovery portion, the UDDI registry is a way to keep up-to-date on the Web Services your organization currently uses. More on Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (new window). An alternative to UDDI is the ebXML Registry (new window).
Source: http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/web_services_explained.html
Service Oriented Architecture SOA - Using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) forms the basis for Web Services. The following figure illustrates the use of WSDL. At the left is a service provider. At the right is a service consumer. The steps involved in providing and consuming a service are:
Service Oriented Architecture SOA - Web Services definition
The term "Web Services" can be confusing. It is, unfortunately, often used in many different ways. Compounding this confusion is term "services" that has a different meaning than the term "Web Services." On this site, the term Web Services refers to the technologies that allow for making connections. Services are what you connect together using Web Services. A service is the endpoint of a connection. Also, a service has some type of underlying computer system that supports the connection offered. The combination of services - internal and external to an organization - make up a service-oriented architecture.
Source: http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/web_services_definition.html
Service Oriented Architecture SOA : Today's XML Management Solution by Melissa Peterman
Enterprises are discovering that they need a tool to unlock all of their content in an efficient and streamlined way without spending a ton of money and time trying to create a way to do it. Companies who already have files and files of useable content have a difficult time accessing their information because their older versions will not talk to their newer ones and their information is stored in a gamut of styles such as PDFs, PowerPoint and images to Excel spreadsheets and word processed documents. Recently, new Content management solutions have evolved to help organizations take control of their content with new Content Application built onto Service Oriented Architectures, SOA , transforming the way organizations deal with enormous contentbases.
With the introduction of the Internet and XML, organizations are using XML content everyday. With that, organizations need to have a searchable system within their own enterprise, that allows access to all of their content with ability to transform all data into XML without the need to create a DTD or XML schema. The solution is XML content servers. XML content servers allow companies to transfer terabytes worth of contentbases into XML. With this new XML management, enterprises can perform Xquery search into their Xquery engine, - like an Internet search engine retrieve files within the enterprise’s own database, except Xquery allows high level programming language to be entered into the search, unlike basic Internet search engines. Whats more, the enterprise is able to retrieve exact matches of text or data or images only related to the Xquery search, not lists and lists of possible matches like an Internet search engine. The Xquery engines are so powerful they can retrieve results within milliseconds after the query. This new XML Management is beneficial for all employees of a business. Developers can perform queries into the Xquery engine and find code that they can then reuse and repurpose into another product or format. Publishers and producers can find completed written works and repurpose and reformat them into new products that can in turn, become a new source of profit.
Businesses are finding that this new Digital Asset Management style allows them to display more of their organization online where they were unable to display it before. Also, with this new digital asset management design, enterprises can learn from their employees by seeing what employees are Xquerying and use that new information to create new content applications and address new ways of content delivery, and present that exact information they are looking for.
Finally, a content management and content delivery solution for content heavy organizations looking for a way to access to all hidden content and create new ways of increasing profit.
For more information about XML Management , Digital Asset Management , Xquery engine , Xquery , Content management , SOA , Content Application content delivery or XML content , go to Mark Logic.
About the Author
About the author : Melissa Peterman is a web content specialist for Innuity.
Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=717193
Service Oriented Architecture SOA Market Update for the Mid-Year 2007 by Bharat Book Bureau
Mumbai 23 July, 2007: Service-orientation Architecture (SOA) is an architecture that uses loosely coupled services to support the requirements of business processes and users. These concepts can be applied to business, software and other types of producer/consumer systems.
Bharat Book Bureau ( www.bharatbook.com ), a leading market information aggregator has added a new report to its collection "SOA Market Pulse: 2007 Mid-Year Market Review" ( http://www.bharatbook.com/detail.asp?id=51006 ). This report presents a mid year review of the SOA market in the APAC region keeping in mind the impact of global trends in the Asia Pacific's SOA Industry.
The Asia Pacific Market is showing an upward trend in adopting web services in their enterprises, which in turn implies more ventures of SOA to penetrate. The SOA framework will economise the cost in software implementations when an enterprise expands its size and requires increase in use of complex software. The SOA industry thus has to widen the base of the SOA application through correct guidance and highlighting the benefits of SOA implementation and its application in a business enterprise.
The market for SOA products is expected to increase by 40% in the year 2007 - 08. Currently, the new software made for easy adaptability on the SOA framework. An SOA enables efficiency in business processes and easy adoption in software at later stages. With the adoption of SOA framework, an enterprise gains flexibility, re-use and consistency which give it an edge over its competitors in the market. More enterprises in Asia Pacific are showing positive signs in adapting to SOA framework as compared to those in Europe and USA especially in adapting it at a middle stage of the existing IT systems. The APAC enterprises are eager to be better equipped at a not only at a national level but at a global level too with respect to IT and services offered to the consumer.
About Bharat Book Bureau:
Bharat Book Bureau, leading information aggregator based in India, facilitates and supports the business information needs by providing relevant information on the radio industry published by global agencies on Software, etc. including country info, technical and management subjects, both in print and electronic format. These include reports, newsletters, country and company profile and online databases.
Kindly visit the following url : http://www.bharatbook.com/detail.asp?id=51006 to order a copy of the report.
About the Author
Bharat Book Bureau, leading information aggregator based in India, facilitates and supports the business information needs by providing relevant information on the radio industry published by global agencies on Software, etc. including country info, technical and management subjects, both in print and electronic format. These include reports, newsletters, country and company profile and online databases.
Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=613958
Service Oriented Architecture - Five great unsolved mysteries of SOA Posted by Joe McKendrick
There’s a lot of mystery still surrounding service-oriented architecture. Many people — even in IT — say they don’t fully understand what it can do, or how to go about building one. For a subject that is being hyped to incredible levels by vendors and analysts, there is precious little information about the fundamental implications of this new approach.
How could SOA be failing when nobody really has SOA yet?
Here are some of the unsolved mysteries that still persist around SOA:
#1 If SOA is failing so miserably, where are the horror stories? Plenty of pundits and analysts declaring SOA to be a failed idea; yet nobody has really completed a SOA implementation yet. There’s been a rush as of late to declare SOA dead in the water, when surveys I have seen and conducted show most companies are still planning or considering their first service-oriented projects. In fact, the major challenge I keep hearing about these days is SOA gets too successful, and too many services are being added or launched willy-nilly — or being demanded — across enterprises that have SOA efforts underway. That’s why so many vendors are hyping governance.
#2 How does one know when a SOA project has been successful or unsuccessful? A paradox comes into play here — the companies most prone to adopt SOA are those that need it the least. If their management has the vision and foresight to support SOA, it’s also very likely putting many other progressive programs in place — business intelligence and analytics, data warehousing, and so forth. How much of their ongoing success is directly attributable to SOA? What’s the definition of success? Documentable cost savings? A single end-to-end process enabled by Web services?
This is one of the biting challenges of SOA to begin with — success is a long-term gain, evidenced by the sharing of services across multiple business units, in which service development time is notably cut back, or, a business is able to reconfigure and achieve faster time to market with a product or service thanks to the increased flexibility of its underlying infrastructure.
But the only true measures of long-term success in the market are either increased revenues or increased stock values, and many factors besides SOA will contribute to this. The real issue is figuring out how to measure SOA’s contribution to this success. The “success” of the SOA itself is irrelevant.
#3 How many full-functioning, true “SOAs” are there, exactly? Some analyst groups say that at least as many companies (75 percent and up) are undertaking SOA implementations. Others say the numbers are as low as four percent at present. How is this measured? By number of services? By the granularity of those services? By number of applications or processes accessing service-enabled, loosely coupled components? When does Just a Bunch of Web Services become SOA? What is the threshold at which Web services may require some better care and feeding, with governance, registry, management, and all that good stuff — and thus become more SOAish?
#4 How do vendors sell a concept that will make it easier for customers to drop their products? What’s in it for them? The benefit of SOA is that services can be swapped out almost on demand. This, of course, is one of the conundrums vendors face, especially those pushing SOA in a big way. (Of course, all vendors say they are about “SOA” these days, right?)
#5 Who’s paying for SOA? What departments are ponying up the money and staff time to launch services that will be used by everyone else — potentially, departments that have not had to commit any resources to take advantage of a service? SOA-enabled applications may take more to build at first than more traditional point-to-point interfaces, and the ROI shows up in economies of scale. As Mark Rix explained it, the economies of scale generated through SOA — better ROI over the long haul — contrast with the cheaper up-front implementation of point-to-point applications. However, the risk occurs when organizations think they’re putting SOA in place, but end up with little or no ROI because it wasn’t true SOA — still point-to-point interfaces. Who’s taking these risks — or who’s being asked to take these risks?
Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=1022
SOA definition
A service-oriented architecture is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed.
Service-oriented architectures are not a new thing. The first service-oriented architecture for many people in the past was with the use DCOM or Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on the CORBA specification. For more on DCOM and CORBA, see Prior service-oriented architectures (new window).
Services
If a service-oriented architecture is to be effective, we need a clear understanding of the term service. A service is a function that is well-defined, self-contained, and does not depend on the context or state of other services. See Service (new window).
Connections
The technology of Web services (new window) is the most likely connection technology of service-oriented architectures. Web services essentially use XML (new window) to create a robust connection.
The following figure illustrates a basic service-oriented architecture. It shows a service consumer at the right sending a service request message to a service provider at the left. The service provider returns a response message to the service consumer. The request and subsequent response connections are defined in some way that is understandable to both the service consumer and service provider. How those connections are defined is explained in Web Services explained (new window). A service provider can also be a service consumer.
Source: http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/service-oriented_architecture_soa_definition.html
Oracle, BEA Systems in $8.5B deal - Activist investor Carl Icahn, BEA's largest shareholder, had been advocating a merger.
See all CNNMoney.com RSS FEEDS (close) By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writer
January 16 2008: 9:57 AM EST
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Software giant Oracle Corp. reached a deal to buy rival BEA Systems Inc. for $8.5 billion Wednesday, just months after its initial offer was rebuffed.
Oracle agreed to pay $19.375 in cash for each share of BEA, representing a 24 percent premium to where BEA's shares closed Tuesday.
Oracle said the deal is worth $7.2 billion, since BEA has $1.3 billion in cash on hand. The deal is expected to close in mid-October.
"For Oracle, this deal is a very big step towards completing our [goal] of being a strategic software vendor of choice for our customers," Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said during a conference call with investors.
Ellison said BEA CEO Alfred Chuang was "a pioneer in middleware," a type of software used by big businesses. With BEA under its wing, Ellison said he intends for Oracle to become a leader in middleware.
Shares of both companies moved on news of the deal. BEA (BEAS) soared 19 percent in morning trading, while Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) ticked lower 1 percent.
Oracle originally approached BEA back in October, when it made a $6.7 billion bid for the firm.
That offer was rejected by the BEA board, which said it wanted an offer of at least $21 a share.
But activist investor Carl Icahn supported a buyout. Icahn, who owns 51.8 million shares, or about 12.8 percent of the company, is BEA's biggest shareholder.
Redwood City, Calif.-based Oracle has a market capitalization of about $110 billion and has acquired more than 30 companies over the last three years, including PeopleSoft for more than $10 billion.
Over that period, Oracle's stock has risen about 60 percent, while BEA's shares have soared more than 80 percent.
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/16/news/companies/oracle/?postversion=2008011608
Oracle Acquires BEA Systems for $8.5 Billion
01/16/2008
Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire all outstanding shares of BEA for $19.375 per share in cash. The offer is valued at approximately $8.5 billion, or $7.2 billion net of BEA's cash on hand of $1.3 billion. "We expect this deal to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 1-2 cents on a non-GAAP basis in its first full year after closing," said Oracle President and Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz.
ebizQ received the following:
"The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle's Fusion middleware software suite," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Oracle Fusion middleware has an open "hot-pluggable" architecture that allows customers the option of coupling BEA's WebLogic Java Server to virtually all the components of the Fusion software suite. That's just one example of how customers can choose among Oracle and BEA middleware products, knowing that those products will gracefully interoperate and be supported for years to come."
"Over the past several months our Board of Directors, with the assistance of independent financial and legal advisors, has reviewed various ways to maximize stockholder value, including engaging in discussions with third parties about a possible sale of the company," said Alfred Chuang, BEA's Chairman and CEO. "This transaction is the culmination of that diligent and thoughtful process, and we believe it is in the best interests of our shareholders. I am confident our innovative products, talented employees and worldwide customer base will be key contributors to the success of the combined company over the long term. We look forward to working with Oracle toward a successful completion of the transaction."
"BEA is a pioneer in middleware, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our joint customers have consistently suggested this deal for more than three years," said Oracle President Charles Phillips. "This transaction will accelerate the adoption of Java-based middleware technologies and SOA; advance innovation in enterprise applications infrastructure software; extend our strategic relationships with customers and partners; and increase our penetration in key regions like China."
The Board of Directors of BEA Systems has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close by mid-2008, subject to BEA stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
Source: http://www.ebizq.net/news/8832.html
Oracle and BEA
On January 16, 2008, Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire BEA Systems, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise application infrastructure solutions. The proposed transaction is subject to closing conditions, including regulatory, shareholder and other approvals. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.
The addition of BEA is expected to accelerate innovation by bringing together two companies with a common vision of a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure and will further increase the value that Oracle delivers to its customers and partners.
There will be a conference call to discuss the transaction at 6:00 a.m. PT today, January 16, 2008. Investors can listen to the conference call by dialing 719-325-4780. A replay will be available for 24 hours after the call ends at 719-457-0820, passcode: 3644405. A live audio webcast of the call will be made available at www.oracle.com/investor and a replay will be available for seven days after the call ends.
Read the press release: Oracle to Acquire BEA Systems
Source: http://www.oracle.com/bea/index.html
Opportunity Knocks, Service Oriented Architecture SOA Consultants Answer
Service-oriented architecture is a very popular concept, but with that popularity comes a price. Namely, finding people with the skills to help put SOA in place is a growing challenge.
Last year, ZapThink's Ron Schmelzer sounded warning bells about a looming enterprise architect "drought" which could derail many SOA efforts. He noted that there "is a significant demand in the marketplace for experienced SOA talent," and "a burgeoning of SOA consulting companies that offer kick-start approaches to SOA in which they supply the experienced architects and their customers supply the heavy-lift labor to implement the services."
Miko Matsumura, vice president of WebMethods, also has expressed concern that SOA movers and shakers in organizations may be too few and far between. That role is falling to what Miko calls "visionary architects," who can provide a "scalability of understanding" to drive the scalability of the system.
AMR Research has just issued a report that also warned that demand for SOA-skilled professionals is exceeding supply. As a result, consultants are jumping into the gap -- As reported in SearchSOA TechTarget, SOA given rise to a massive opportunity for consultants, the consultancy observes. This is much like the demand the way "Web consulting was at the end of the 1990s," writes Ian Finley, AMR research director.
However, not all service providers are comfortable with SOA quite yet. Interestingly, AMR noted that SOA consulting was not the most profitable route for software vendors, with the exception of IBM, which has a large SOA practice. Once a company begins to move toward SOA, this dynamic changes. "Once a company is comfortable with SOA as its standard approach, it often seeks to shift all project work over to SOA," Finley wrote in the report. "Given the shortage of SOA skills in a typical company and the difficulty training some traditional IT staff in the SOA approach, consulting firms are well positioned to reap a windfall of SOA projects the coming years."
The AMR report notes that this is "a sea change from what systems integrators and service providers has done in the past, such as integration between applications, implementation of ERP applications, along with IT planning and strategy work. All those things now are being converted over to SOA at customer request. In other words the customers are telling them we don't want to do things in the old way. We want to do this with the knowledge of SOA."
Source: http://www.soainaction.com/blog/2008/01/a_growing_industry_soa_consult.php
ZapThink's 2008 Service Oriented Architecture SOA Forecast
01/04/2008 By Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, ZapThink LLC
The wreaths are down, the days are getting longer, and snow is on the ground, so it must be time for ZapThink's annual retrospective and forecast for the world of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
This time, however, 2008 is a leap year, which means we're heading into the US election season and looking forward to the Olympics. We're also dealing with an uncertain economic outlook that may very well impact the enterprises that are relying upon SOA to enable their information technology (IT) shops to provide increasingly agile solutions to the business. As we look back to last year's predictions, as well as looking forward to new ones for the coming year, we'll take into account the changing business landscape as it provides a new perspective on business across the globe.
Review of 2007 Forecast
Our first prognostication from one year ago centered on the SOA quality and testing market. We predicted that as a result of a heightened awareness of the real challenges in maintaining a SOA implementation, demand for SOA quality and testing solutions would skyrocket in 2007, leading to greater acquisitions, increased consolidation, new venture creation, and boatloads of case studies on the topic. In retrospect, our guess was on the right track, but today we'd expect the full force of the prediction to take a few more years. True, the demand for SOA quality and testing solutions did increase substantially in 2007, leading to several case studies, but we've yet to see acquisitions or other signs of consolidation in this space -- yet.
Our second gaze into the SOA crystal ball presaged a shortage of qualified, experienced Enterprise Architects (EAs), leading to "paper architects" who put desirable skills on their resume without the experience to back those resumes up. We also predicted a rise in EA/SOA training options, including a shameless plug for our newly launched Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) training and credentialing program. On this prediction we hit the bull's-eye. Not only has the dearth of qualified EAs impacted SOA initiatives across the globe, but many SOA initiatives have foundered primarily because the SOA team gets into a room and all you hear is "hey, I thought you knew how to do this SOA stuff!" And furthermore, our commercial for the LZA program worked as well, as we've had hundreds of architects go through the program in 2007 and obtain their credential, and we expect hundreds more in 2008.
The third prediction in last year's ZapFlash was that the commercial SOA platform/SOA suite would collapse under its own weight, giving rise to increased adoption of open source SOA infrastructure. The argument we provided was that these SOA solutions had grown from individual, point-products that solved discrete SOA problems into gigantic SOA suites that seemed to be every bit the monolithic platform that they had been intended to replace. We pointed out that monolithic SOA platforms, in which you have to buy all the various parts of the solution in order to get the true value as promised by the vendor, is at its core an un-SOA philosophy.
In retrospect, this prediction has been true for some vendors, while others have gotten their act together at least to some extent and are offering a more loosely coupled set of SOA infrastructure capabilities to the market. In fact, this "SOA platform pitfall" has tended to bifurcate the SOA infrastructure marketplace, with one group of large vendors providing solutions that organizations are successfully leveraging in their SOA initiatives, with the other, thankfully smaller collection of vendors still offering "lipstick on the pig" middleware that now supports Web Services, but is still just the same old middleware under the covers. We have a policy of not naming names in ZapFlashes, but you vendors know who you are! And while open source SOA infrastructure continues to make inroads in many enterprises, we're generally seeing a reluctance on the part of EAs to recommend an all open source approach, instead favoring one of the larger vendors' suites, especially if they already have an established relationship with that vendor.
ZapThink's Predictions for SOA 2008
As we suggested in the introduction, our first prediction for 2008 takes into account the current economic slowdown. Now, we're not about to predict the depth or length of such a downturn, but we can hazard to foresee how macroeconomic forces might impact SOA initiatives in enterprises in the US and abroad. It would be easy to simply say that tightening IT pursestrings will lead to cancellations or at least postponements of SOA initiatives, but we don't see that happening as a universal pattern. Instead, we see a slowdown separating enterprises into two groups: organizations who have turned the corner with their SOA initiatives and are seeing (or are about to see) real benefits from the new architectural approach, versus those companies who are still struggling with their SOA projects.
Because SOA done right helps organizations compete in periods of change, SOA is of particular importance in times of economic flux. After all, agility means dealing with such changes, so if there's any time to have SOA in place, it's now. Unfortunately, however, many organizations are still struggling with the business case for SOA, or even worse, have made a wrong turn or reached some kind of impasse with their SOA initiatives. For those organizations, we do predict cancellations of SOA projects and deferments of SOA spending, to their detriment. Because after all, their competition might very well be leveraging SOA to be more successful during a downturn, leaving the unsuccessful companies out in the cold.
The second 2008 ZapThink prognostication looks at enterprise mashups and their relationship with SOA. Our definition of an enterprise mashup is a governed, managed composition of loosely coupled Services within the context of a rich, collaborative, Internet-based environment. In other words, enterprise mashups are what organizations actually do with SOA. Our prediction, then, is that the world of enterprise mashups will come into its own in 2008, and become what many people are calling the "killer use-case" for SOA. In fact, as we predicted a few years ago, SOA will fade from view as an increasing number of organizations focus on enterprise mashups as the mechanism for business empowerment in the enterprise.
Finally, our third prediction for 2008 actually includes a prediction for ZapThink itself. We're seeing a scramble at the larger consulting organizations for SOA capabilities, for two main reasons. First, SOA projects are a huge growth area for these firms, and people who really know how to execute on a SOA initiative are in short supply. But more importantly, these professional services organizations continue to struggle with increasing their margins, as the full impact of offshoring works its way through their industry. The large Indian consulting firms, for example, have achieved stellar growth based upon their ability to offer low-cost solutions, but with low costs come low margins. Now that these firms are competing globally, they are all being pressed to offer higher-margin capabilities that position them as global players.
SOA expertise is essential to these organizations, as well as their US and European competitors, not because they need to fill the ranks with mid-level architects and implementers (which they do), but more so because they need to establish SOA leadership in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. So, our prediction for 2008 is that one of these firms will acquire ZapThink, as well as other SOA thought leadership firms, because we can establish the winning acquirer as a global SOA leader -- and with that leadership comes higher margins for their SOA solutions team as a whole. Furthermore, because there are only a few firms like ours out there, we predict a scramble for the top SOA thought leadership, once the hunt is on. At least, that's what we hope!
The ZapThink Take The key takeaway from this ZapFlash is that we predict 2008 to be a "get business done" year for SOA. We're now past the hype days, and now it's time to achieve real business goals. For enterprises, achieving true success with SOA initiatives will enable those firms that get it right to rise above their competition. For vendors, the ones that have true SOA offerings will succeed, and the pretenders will eventually pack up their toys and find something else to sell. For consultants, SOA will become more than an entry point for implementation work, but will segue into high value, high margin management consulting, as their clients leverage EA best practices to achieve business goals across the board.
And as for ZapThink? Regardless of whether we're acquired or not, or by whom, we expect to continue to provide our audience of architects and other SOA aficionados with the same insight and value we've been providing up to this point. After all, our value is in our brand and what it means to the global audience of EAs who've been following us for the last eight years. So regardless of what 2008 has in store, SOA, and ZapThink, are here to stay.
ZapThink (http://www.zapthink.com ) is an Enterprise Architecture (EA), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Web 2.0 strategy advisory firm and recognized SOA and EA authority. ZapThink offers SOA advisory, training and credentialing, and master-level architecture mentorship to enterprises, consulting firms, and vendors worldwide.
Source: http://www.ebizq.net/news/8772.html
Get Serious About SOA Governance: A 5-Step Plan for Architects By BEA Systems
About this feature:Whether your organization's Service- Oriented Architecture (SOA) has 50 services in use by one customer, or 50 customers using one service, you need SOA governance in order to fully benefit from your SOA. Increased business and IT agility depends on SOA governance: the ability to quickly and continuously translate and transmit business strategy and requirements into the policies and standards that will guide the evolution of the SOA—and your enterprise. Get Serious About SOA Governance: A 5-Step Action Plan for Architects, will help you get SOA governance right, and get what you expect out of your SOA.
Source: For more details, please visit http://www.ebizq.net/white_papers/8702.html
Trends for 2008: Service Oriented Architecture SOA and Specialized Messaging Patterns By Laurel Reitman, Senior Architect, Adobe Systems, Incorporated ; Duane Nickull, Senior Technical Editor, Adobe Systems, Incorporated ; James Ward, Technical Evangelist, Flex, Adobe Systems, Incorporated ; Jack Wilbur, Freelance Writer, Adobe Systems, Incorporated
About this feature:From Adobe: New trends in the computer industry rely upon SOA as the enabling foundation to build infrastructures for those with needs (consumers) and those with capabilities (providers) to interact via services across disparate domains of technology and ownership.
Source: For more details, please visit http://www.ebizq.net/hot_topics/soa/features/8794.html
Gartner Report: Technical Approaches to and Considerations for SOA Governance by Mercury
> View this now
Published on: October 2006Type of content: VENDOR WHITE PAPERFormat: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) (136 kb) Length: 8 pagesPrice: FREE
Overview:For most organizations, the major challenge of service-oriented architecture governance will be sharing reusable services across business units. However, methodologies and technologies must mature before IT organizations can successfully perform SOA governance.What You Need to KnowService-oriented architecture (SOA) is about more than just services – it’s about the various artifacts and assets that relate to and affect a service or set of services. Each of these artifacts and assets are in various stages of their life cycles, including development, deployment, usage and governance. They must all be equally governed. SOA project owners should be discouraged from organizing around the traditional concepts of feature implementation, design-time and runtime. Similarly, they should refrain from buying governing technologies that are “limited” to design-time or runtime distinctions, and instead purchase governing technologies that enable them to direct an SOA’s multiple life cycles.This whitepaper examines Gartner's three linked requirements for effective SOA governance: SOA testing and validation, SOA Registry-Repository and SOA policy management; and purchase recommendations for governance technologies that address SOA's multiple life cycles.
Source: http://www.knowledgestormqa.com/kstestingandqa/search/viewabstract/86648/index.jsp?pos=1&referer=SEARCH_RESULTS&trkpg=search_results_abstractGartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008
Analysts Examine Latest Industry Trends During Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, October 7-12, in Orlando
STAMFORD, Conn., October 9, 2007 — Gartner, Inc. analysts today highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 12.
Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
“Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology. The important thing is to ask the question and proactively plan.”
The top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 include:
Green IT. The focus of Green IT that came to the forefront in 2007 will accelerate and expand in 2008. Consider potential regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the impact on power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Some companies are emphasizing their social responsibility behavior, which might result in vendor preferences and policies that affect IT decisions. Scheduling decisions for workloads on servers will begin to consider power efficiency as a key placement attribute.
Unified Communications. Today, 20 percent of the installed base with PBX has migrated to IP telephony, but more than 80 percent are already doing trials of some form. Gartner analysts expect the next three years to be the point at which the majority of companies implement this, the first major change in voice communications since the digital PBX and cellular phone changes in the 1970s and 1980s.
Business Process Modeling. Top-level process services must be defined jointly by a set of roles (which include enterprise architects, senior developers, process architects and/or process analysts). Some of those roles sit in a service oriented architecture center of excellence, some in a process center of excellence and some in both. The strategic imperative for 2008 is to bring these groups together. Gartner expects BPM suites to fill a critical role as a compliment to SOA development.
Metadata Management. Through 2010, organizations implementing both customer data integration and product integration and product information management will link these master data management initiatives as part of an overall enterprise information management (EIM) strategy. Metadata management is a critical part of a company’s information infrastructure. It enables optimization, abstraction and semantic reconciliation of metadata to support reuse, consistency, integrity and shareability. Metadata management also extends into SOA projects with service registries and application development repositories. Metadata also plays a role in operations management with CMDB initiatives.
Virtualization 2.0. Virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads. However, by themselves, virtualization technologies are simply enablers that help broader improvements in infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility and resiliency. With the addition of automation technologies – with service-level, policy-based active management – resource efficiency can improve dramatically, flexibility can become automatic based on requirements, and services can be managed holistically, ensuring high levels of resiliency. Virtualization plus service-level, policy-based automation constitutes an RTI.
Mashup & Composite Apps. By 2010, Web mashups will be the dominant model (80 percent) for the creation of composite enterprise applications. Mashup technologies will evolve significantly over the next five years, and application leaders must take this evolution into account when evaluating the impact of mashups and in formulating an enterprise mashup strategy.
Web Platform & WOA. Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming a viable option in more markets and companies must evaluate where service based delivery may provide value in 2008-2010. Meanwhile Web platforms are emerging which provide service-based access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through Web based “cloud computing” environments. Companies must also look beyond SaaS to examine how Web platforms will impact their business in 3-5 years.
Computing Fabric. A computing fabric is the evolution of server design beyond the interim stage, blade servers, that exists today. The next step in this progression is the introduction of technology to allow several blades to be merged operationally over the fabric, operating as a larger single system image that is the sum of the components from those blades. The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors, and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suits the owner’s needs. For example a large server can be created by combining 32 processors and a number of memory modules from the pool, operating together over the fabric to appear to an operating system as a single fixed server.
Real World Web. The term “real world Web” is informal, referring to places where information from the Web is applied to the particular location, activity or context in the real world. It is intended to augment the reality that a user faces, not to replace it as in virtual worlds. It is used in real-time based on the real world situation, not prepared in advance for consumption at specific times or researched after the events have occurred. For example in navigation, a printed list of directions from the Web do not react to changes, but a GPS navigation unit provides real-time directions that react to events and movements; the latter case is akin to the real-world Web of augmented reality. Now is the time to seek out new applications, new revenue streams and improvements to business process that can come from augmenting the world at the right time, place or situation.
Social Software. Through 2010, the enterprise Web 2.0 product environment will experience considerable flux with continued product innovation and new entrants, including start-ups, large vendors and traditional collaboration vendors. Expect significant consolidation as competitors strive to deliver robust Web 2.0 offerings to the enterprise. Nevertheless social software technologies will increasingly be brought into the enterprise to augment traditional collaboration.
“These 10 opportunities should be considered in conjunction with many proven, fully-matured technologies, as we as others that did not make this list, but can provide value for many companies,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “For example, real-time enterprises providing advanced devices for a mobile workforce will consider next-generation smartphones to be a key technology, in addition to the value that this list might offer.”
About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo
Symposium/ITxpo is the industry’s largest and most strategic conference for senior IT and business professions. More than 6,000 senior business and IT strategists from virtually all major industries will gather to gain the latest advice on the biggest challenge: driving profits and performance with IT. Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees’ annual planning efforts. They rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/symposium/us
Source: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=530109
SOA Service Oriented Architecture Web 2.0, Internet Marketing Basics by Troy Berlin
If you’ve ever been involved in a small business, or possibly even a home-based business then you’ve most likely hit the brick wall, just as many people do. No, I’m not talking about start up capital, or operating expenses, because starting a home business is actually one of the most affordable ways for the average person to break into the world of business, and break out of the world of 9 to 5 slavery.
The brick wall that I’m referring to is that of creating exposure for your products and services, and generating traffic for your web sites, presentations, and business briefings. In fact, one can very quickly find themselves pulling out their hair with shear frustration and confusion.
What once was a world of duplication, manipulation, and old school marketing, has in a matter of a few short years been swept aside by those on the cutting edge of the Internet landscape. The cutting edge of what has become the world of web 2.0. Unfortunately, despite the trends, most people really do not know what web 2.0 really is.
Of course, it’s cutting edge, it’s now, it’s happening, but are you using it?
Don’t get me wrong, web 2.0 Internet Marketing is not rocket science, but you do need to be armed with the basics. Just putting a few video clips on your site, or tossing up an audio file or two that people can access or download does not make your site a web 2.0 experience. In fact this has been done for years, but what does make it web 2.0?
Here are a few things to consider before jumping head long into the world of web 2.0 Internet Marketing, and possibly a few suggestions that may make your transition into this world a bit easier.
Architecture of Participation The first element of a well-designed web 2.0 experience is something called the Architecture of Participation. You might also hear things like RIA (Rich Internet Applications), or even SOA (Service Oriented Applications).
Despite the use of fancy buzzwords, this simply refers to the user experience. Is the site pleasing to the eye, easy to use, and most importantly does the site make it possible for visitors to participate in the content of the web site?
This could best be demonstrated by taking a look at sites such as YouTube.com, GoArticles.com, as well as social networking sites like MySpace.com. Each of these examples has a very well planned Architecture of Participation.
Mash Ups & Integration The next element of a true web 2.0 experience is often called the mash up, or content integration. This is actually quite simple. Again, going back to sites like MySpace.com, you’ll see that participants can implement many different sources of web content. You’ll not only see video and audio, but you’ll also see blogs, comments, and networks of friends. Many sites will also integrate content from multiple sources or sites onto a single, new web site that generates fresh content on the fly, ready for eager site visitors.
Mashing multiple streams of content onto a new web site is where the term Mash Ups actually came from, which here again, is not rocket science when you determine what content your visitors might like to see, hear, or read. It’s simply a matter of pulling the appropriate content and mashing it up into one convenient place.
Social Networking Finally, social networking is a big part of web 2.0. Of course, it’s deeply routed in the Architecture of Participation, and it almost always implements the mash up to create unique content, but the unique factor in social networking is that it’s designed to bring like minded people together.
Networking is the key to building successful long-term business relationships, but if you’ve ever hit your friends and family up with a business opportunity, you’ve probably discovered that they’re not always as like-minded as you might have originally hoped.
Tapping into such social networks can put you, and your business or opportunity in front of literally millions of potential prospects and future business partners, and because you are networking with like-minded people, you’re not forced to go old school when it comes to pitching your opportunity or product.
Over all, web 2.0 is a major departure in traditional marketing, and is light years beyond the days of mass mailing and classified ad submission. It is a whole new mindset in terms of building relationships, by simply rethinking the design process of your next web site, and oh yeah, the best part is that web 2.0 will cost you absolutely nothing to implement into your business.
Basically, the key to web 2.0 Internet Marketing is in the user experience. Gone are the days of sit and stare web sites. With a little creativity, and a touch of web 2.0, it’s now possible to turn a one way experience into a two way stream of communication, which is the key to any business success.
About the Author
Troy Berlin has been involved in small business, and home-based business operations for more than 15 years. and is currently active in home business consulting, training, and coaching. Anyone can achieve success in there own business by applying a simple, effective, and proven system. Learn the True Art and Science of Web 2.0 Marketing in the Prosperity Cast Network
Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=714332
Web 2.0 technologies and SOA at Softweb Solutions by Arpit Kothari
Web 2.0 technologies and SOA at Softweb Solutions
The Softweb Solutions team has acquired vast expertise in designing & implementing business solutions based on Web 2.0 technologies. We offer the most comprehensive & complete Web 2.0 based solutions that will help your organization to capitalize on the advances of computing technology and put it to optimal use. Our approach involves extensive interactions with cross-functional & inter-departmental resources in your organization right from conceptualization to delivering the final solution.
Web 2.0 is not a new technology or a new set of rules. Web 2.0 is an idea. At the heart of Web 2.0 is the idea that the Web is a platform. Not an advertising platform, but a platform where users control their own data and from which scalable services are offered. Web 2.0 is about services rather than packaged software and it is about offerings compatible with many devices (mobile phones, portable gaming consoles, different internet browsers, etc).
Call us now to find out how our Web 2.0 solutions can transform your business.
Softweb Solutions is a provide now SOA, Traditionally, IT works with business owners who are influenced by application vendors. This results in IT strategies that are application or integration-focused. This results in many "one-off" applications that may or may not be integrated into the existing architecture. Problems surface when mergers and acquisitions introduce new software platforms and methodology to an already fragmented architecture, but IT rarely has sufficient resources to complete business systems integration. As a result, IT often ends up deploying multiple systems that perform the same tasks within an enterprise or business unit.
Service Oriented Archhitectures (SOA) The New Paradigam Download Whitepaper
[b]Softweb solutions inc[/b] CHICAGO (US) 5707 Breezeland Road, Carpentersville, Chicago
IL 60110 Toll-Free Number : 1-866 345 7638 Fax : 847-628-4783 http://www.softwebsolutions.com/
About the Author
Softweb solutions inc offers offshore custom software development, web based application, web designing, localization and test outsourcing.
Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=571109
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Glossary
Service - Services are self-contained, reusable software modules that are independent of applications and the computing platforms on which they run. Services have with well-defined interfaces and allow a 1:1 mapping between business tasks and the exact IT components needed to execute the task.
Service orientation - A way of thinking about your business processes as linked, loosely coupled tasks supported by services.
SOA - Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks, or services. SOA helps today’s businesses innovate by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. SOA helps customers increase the flexibility of their business processes, strengthen their underlying IT infrastructure and reuse their existing IT investments by creating connections among disparate applications and information sources.
SOA foundation - Integrated, open-standard-based set of software, best practices and patterns that is designed to provide what you need to get started with your SOA.
SOA infrastructure - As clients adopt SOA this new simplified, virtualized and distributed application frameworks pose challenges for infrastructures that must be addressed. To ensure the new applications can meet their performance, availability, scalability, security and management requirements, the infrastructure needs to be assessed and transformed to support SOA.
SOA infrastructure solution - The SOA infrastructure solution from IBM is designed to help you increase business flexibility, responsiveness and performance by enabling your IT infrastructure for SOA. We start by leveraging your existing IT assets, then evaluate, design and implement the enhancements needed to establish a more flexible and robust infrastructure.
SOA lifecycle - The SOA Lifecycle defines a methodology for conducting successful SOA projects by modeling the business process and the services that will support them, assembling the services into a composite application, deploying the services in a robust, scaleable environment, managing and monitoring key IT resources and business metrics, and doing all of these lifecycle steps while adhering to solid governance and best practices.
SOA Reference Archictecture - SOA Reference Architecture defines the comprehensive IT services required to support your SOA at each stage in the SOA life cycle.
SOA Scenarios - SOA Scenarios define specific SOA projects customers can implement while focusing on a very small number of targeted software products and/or services per project.
Source: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/glossary/index.html
Where the SOA Technology Vendors are Falling Down
There seems to be a few core issues out there that are haunting most SOA vendors today. While the number of issues are complex and far reaching, I believe we can boil them down into a few key talking points, including:
• Let's talk not listen.
• We're a hammer, thus you must be a nail.
• Let's just bolt something on.
Let's talk not listen refers to the fact that many vendors are so bound to their messaging, collateral, and sales pitches that they don't seem to find the time to listen to the issues of the customer before proposing a solution. While it would be nice if everyone had the common courtesy to have a SOA problem domain that fit your definition of SOA, the truth is that enterprises are like snowflakes…no two are alike and in order to propose the correct solution you have to spend the time understanding what the native issues are. In fact, I would recommend an 80/20 rule. Spend 80 percent of your time listening, and 20 percent of your time talking. You'll be surprised how much better things go.
We're a hammer, thus you must be a nail, refers to the fact that most SOA vendors sell a particular product that does a particular thing. Thus, when looking at the unique issues of the customer, attempt to force fit the technology no matter what the architectural issues are. For instance, when selling an data integration solution all SOAs that they see are data integration problems, ignoring the need for behavior and transactional integration, even though they are needed, because those concepts don't fit into the patterns of the product.
Let's just bolt something on, refers to the fact that most vendors are attempting to sell "magical technology," that when bolted onto the existing infrastructure will indeed create an SOA. However, that never works, and in many instances they are actually making things worse by driving their existing architecture to be even that much more complex. The hard truth is that SOA, as the "A" implies is an architecture, which means a systemic change in the use and configuration of the IT resources, and in a SOA world means abstracting things as services and configuring those services into solutions. An ESB or a governance tool won't do that, it takes careful planning, execution, and selecting the right technology. There are many best practices and a true lifecycle issues to consider here, it's never just technology driven.
Source: http://weblog.infoworld.com/realworldsoa/archives/2007/12/where_the_soa_t.html
Linthicum’s SOA Predictions for 2008
It seems that pundit predictions are mandatory this time of year, so I'll not be an exception. So, here are my SOA predictions for 2008.
Outsourcing Trends 2007: What's New And What's Not? by Hans Kriniger, Intellias Ltd.
The slight decrease in the IT dynamics at the beginning of 2000s being over, the new drivers has fueled further development of the IT branch throughout 2006 - 2007.
One of the tendencies of the global impact has to deal with growing business value of the Internet as well as associated boom in e-commerce. The IT-rich enterprises have won substantial market advantage over the competitors that have not placed IT as the key element of their business strategy. According to Gartner, the investments in the new information technologies would double within 2006 - 2010 period.
The burning IT issues of the two previous years have included digital convergence, mobility and Service-oriented architecture. Other point of focal interest turns out to be the alignment of IT and business processes within the enterprise in general and in sourcing models in particular.
The analysts from Experton Group have come up with the statement that in the next few years outsourcing "would be the driving force behind IT market dynamics". Despite the global slow down in outsourcing dynamics - for the most part in America, the number and quality of outsourcing contracts concluded in Europe has risen during the first quarter of 2007 (Morrison & Foerster's Global Sourcing Group). The year 2007, alike the previous one, has demonstrated the increase in the IT staff, despite the forecasts for decrease due to the outsourcing of IT activities. Hence, it proves out that outsourcing strengthens the market position of outsourcing buyers, expanding their technological scope and consequently creates new workplaces.
During the past few years we have seen the shift occurring in decisive factors for outsourcing: in addition to traditional reduction of development costs, outsourcing buyers become more and more interested in access to the pool of talents (due to the internal shortages of highly-qualified IT graduates) and industry-specific know-how. Another visible trend of 2007 is multisourcing, accompanied by growing process-orientation. The time of "mega-deals" is left behind, while overwhelming reduction of the contract's scope becoming a nowadays reality. "Gartner's Key Predictions for 2007" include the forecast that through 2009, market share for the top 10 IT outsourcers will decline to 40.0 percent (from 43.5 percent now), equalling a revenue shift of $5.4 billion. The above mentioned trend consequently leads to the growing number of SMEs on the IT arena and therefore the increase of the impact on the outsourcing landscape.
Precise attention should also be devoted to the Top Trends 2007, outlined by CIO Insight: particularly, Management section of the forecast features predictions that outsourcing will change IT management and that offshoring will shift from India. Concerning the later tendency, notwithstanding pure neashoring, it is worth to note that Indian outsourcing providers are increasingly seeking possibilities for mergers with Eastern European software developers. Inevitably, outsourcing "moves closer to home", with Indian and Chinese outsourcing proposals becoming less appealing to European vendors.
Over the years, data privacy as well as data security has become fundamental prerequisites for successful outsourcing cooperation. Therefore, intellectual property issues together with effective practices on risk mitigation will stay top of the agenda for the years to come. Also, outsourcing service providers are expected to be capable of driving innovation and delivering industry specific know how. Another trend of interest, highlighted by Morrison & Foerster's Global Sourcing Group, introduces transformational application outsourcing, which foresees restructuring of the code in a more modern architecture, therefore making it deployable in SOA.
To sum up with, the coming years will see tighter alignment between outsourcing providers and software development vendors, resulting in more effective business cooperation models. Also, increasing competition will fuel more innovative approach to outsourcing, with process orientation becoming the core of it.
About the Author
Intellias is an ISO-certified software development company with its Development Office in Lviv (Western Ukraine) and Sales & Marketing division in Zürich (Switzerland). The company specializes in Internet/Intranet Applications, Distributed Systems, MS Windows Applications as well as Embedded Systems. http://www.intellias.com
Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=495087
