SOA Software buys LogicLibrary

Service Oriented Architecture SOA Software buys LogicLibrary

Combination links governance automation, repository technologies by Paul Krill

Matching up critical components in the SOA space, SOA Software, which provides SOA governance automation, said Monday it has acquired SOA repository and governance vendor LogicLibrary.

The combination creates an integrated SOA automation solution, SOA Software said. Enterprises can accelerate adoption of SOA with rapid delivery of services for distributed and mainframe environments, the company said.

The addition of LogicLibrary technology extends SOA Software integration capabilities across governed deployment platforms, such as IBM, JBoss, Microsoft, and SAP, SOA Software said.

"Basically, what LogicLibrary brings to us is SOA asset lifecycle management as well as SOA development governance and SOA repository," said Roberto Medrano, executive vice president at SOA Software. "Those are important to complete our integrated SOA governance [portfolio]."

"From our standpoint, this provides complementary technology so we can provide [an] end-to-end integrated governance solution," added Brent Carlson, who was founder and CTO of LogicLibrary and now has become senior vice president of technology for SOA Software. The merger provides a natural fit between the SOA Software Workbench for software policy governance and the LogicLibrary Logidex repository, Carlson said.

SOA Software did not release the monetary value of the transaction. The deal closed last week.

Source: SOA Service Oriented Architecture news at InfoWorld.com

Report: SOA Market To Jump FourFold by 2014

SOA News : Report: SOA Market To Jump FourFold by 2014

A new report on the surging SOA market predicts that the size of the SOA infrastructure market will grow by more than fourfold over the next six years, to more than $9 billion.

SOA markets at $2 billion in 2007 are expected to reach $9.1 billion by 2014, according to according to “Services Oriented Architecture SOA Infrastructure Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, 2008 to 2014,” prepared by WinterGreen Research Inc.

Authors said the surge in SOA infrastructure growth will come as vendors create ways to help enterprises reduce the costs of running their IT departments by developing a more automated process from software and freeing the budgets for investment in flexible response to changing market conditions, the report said.

Source: xwebservices.com

SOA World - SOA SDLC: On-Demand

SOA News : SOA World - SOA SDLC: On-Demand

Spending time with my parents over the holidays got me thinking about the differences between my generation and the previous one.

My parents expect to spend a certain amount of time and effort managing particular aspects of their lives. For example, when they drive to an unfamiliar vacation spot, they inquire about directions and even write or plot the route before they head out. Whereas for me, it’s a matter of popping out an iPhone or a GPS device, saving time, improving accuracy, and avoiding the mistakes of manually drafting the directions.

Source: xwebservices.com

AJAX World - SOA Created AJAX and Rich Internet Applications

SOA News : AJAX World - SOA Created AJAX and Rich Internet Applications

SOA has come a long way from a concept to wide-scale adoption by the enterprise at multiple layers of IT. SOA implementation at the UI layer is the latest in SOA adoption trends. SOA has manifested itself in a number of flavors such as the creation of a rich user experience by using technology like AJAX (e.g., Google Maps), provisioning value-added services by mashing up data from multiple sources (e.g., chicagocrime.org), community-based peer-to-peer interactions (e.g., Facebook and Flickr), creating collective intelligence (e.g., Digg and del.icio.us), creating collaborative platforms often catering to a trusted community, and creating modular content-based sites (e.g., Marumushi.com).

Source: xwebservices.com

User-group study: Mainframes live on through SOA

SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : User-group study: Mainframes live on through SOA

Mainframe systems are playing a key role in many SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects, according to a study released this week by IBM user group SHARE. By Chris Kanaracus

Mainframe systems are playing a key role in many SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects, according to a study released this week by IBM user group SHARE.

Mainframes such as IBM's System z are integral to SOA almost by default, since they contain a large portion of the world's business information, the study suggests. Thirty percent of respondents who work for companies with 10,000 or more employees said between 51 percent and 75 percent of their company's data is managed and stored on a mainframe, according to the study.

Meanwhile, nearly 23 percent of respondents said their company is undergoing a SOA project, and another third said a SOA is in the planning or consideration stages.

Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they are pursuing an enterprise-wide SOA, but in most cases the projects are confined to niche instances, such specific lines of business or divisions or within applications.

"Many of the applications that need to be SOA-enabled are mainframe applications," said Pamela Taylor, vice president of strategic development for SHARE and a solutions architect for a subsidiary of a Fortune 50 company. "System z tends to be absolutely critical to deployments."

While mainframes play a dominant role in hosting an enterprise's data, companies' interaction with that data faces constraints. At least 50 percent of the companies surveyed use hand-coded scripts to push mainframe-based data to other databases or platforms, according to the study. Such scripting is hard to maintain, particularly if the programmers who wrote it leave the organization, the study notes.

IBM has aligned System z with SOA.

The study notes that SOA can strain systems, such as through its use of XML-based messaging. "Rather than acquire more server hardware to attempt to address growing SOA performance issues, mainframes may represent a more cost-effective option for leveraging existing resources," the study states.

In turn, the abstraction layer a SOA provides can help enterprises more easily tap their existing mainframe applications and data, the study notes.

Sales for System z fell last year but IBM is banking on the launch of its next-generation mainframe in February.

Some 431 SHARE members responded to the survey, which was conducted by Unisphere Research. About 48 percent work for companies with 1,000 or more employees, and 26 percent of respondents' firms have more than US$1 billion in revenue.

Source: http://pcworld.about.com/od/webbasedapplications/User-group-study-Mainframes-l.htm

Thunderhead Positioned as Leader in Celent Report on Document Automation for Insurers

SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : Thunderhead Positioned as Leader in Celent Report on Document Automation for Insurers

NewsvineCommentTop Analyst Firm Highlights Global Software Vendor's US Insurance Customer Base and Technology Innovation

Thunderhead, the leading provider of enterprise communications solutions, has been named in a recent Celent report, “Document Automation Solution Vendors for Insurers 2007,” as one of the industry’s leading vendors. The report, which profiles the US operations of several document automation vendors, differentiates Thunderhead NOW, the company’s document generation platform, from traditional players in the insurance industry by spotlighting its technology leadership and innovation.

Thunderhead NOW enables insurance companies worldwide to manage and deliver rich, multi-channel customer communications, empowering business users to improve time-to-value. With Thunderhead NOW, companies can also effectively maximize customer engagement and retention. Celent’s ABCD Vendor Comparison Model, a multi-dimensional graph, ranks vendors based on their product’s functionality, technology, number of customers and depth of client services.

Celent’s report and rating style suggest the Thunderhead NOW enterprise communications platform may provide superior flexibility for insurers. Its easy integration with an organization’s existing business process management (BPM) and enterprise content management (ECM) systems, as well as its leadership in leveraging XML and service-oriented architecture (SOA), illustrate the product’s “one-platform-for-all-communications” approach. This highlights its attractiveness to insurance companies of all sizes.

“Thunderhead has utilized XML and other open standards to create a very flexible and powerful document automation system,” said report author Jeff Goldberg, senior analyst with Celent. “The Thunderhead platform is intended to move document authoring out of the hands of IT and move the responsibility of creating content to content owners and design to designers. The Thunderhead approach provides an excellent opportunity to manage a brand strategy across all documents and channels.”

“Thunderhead’s large base of customers in the insurance industry must have access to the right tools for enabling personalized, multi-channel communications,” said Glen Manchester, chief executive officer of Thunderhead. “The Celent team clearly understands our positioning and the value of our open-standards approach, validating the way our platform separates presentation style from content. This helps with maintenance and enables multi-channel communication, which is critical in order to communicate with your customers effectively. We’re happy to be named in this very competitive industry as a leading vendor, and to be recognized by Celent’s experienced team of experts.”

Thunderhead was named to Software Magazine’s Annual Software 500 for 2007, which ranked the company as one of the world’s largest software companies. For more information on Thunderhead and its products, please visit www.thunderhead.com.

About Thunderhead

Thunderhead is the leading provider of enterprise solutions for the production of multi-channel business communications. Thunderhead delivers the only enterprise platform that enables business users to manage the end-to-end process of creating intelligent, personalized communications across multiple channels.

Due to its unique combination of business-user control, genuine open standards-based core, and enterprise capabilities, Thunderhead has quickly established itself as the clear market leader for financial services organizations. Thunderhead’s customer base includes many of the world’s leading insurance organizations, including Prudential, Allianz, West Bend Mutual Insurance and ICAT, and is serviced from offices located in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Thunderhead is one of the world’s fastest-growing software companies, as recognized by Software 500 in the US and The Sunday Times in the UK.

For further information please visit www.thunderhead.com

Contacts:

for Thunderhead
Katie Eakins / Patrick Wallace, 619-677-2700
thunderhead@lewispr.com

Source: http://markets.about.com/about?GUID=4846700&Page=MediaViewer&ChannelID=3191

Software AG plans SOA alliance

SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : Software AG plans SOA alliance

German business application vendor Software AG hopes to create an alliance of small European software vendors targeting the market for SOA (service-oriented architecture) applications and services. By John Blau

German business application vendor Software AG hopes to create an alliance of small European software vendors targeting the market for SOA (service-oriented architecture) applications and services.

"By bundling resources, many smaller software companies will be able to compete
more effectively in this new SOA market," Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO of Software
AG, said Thursday during a news conference at the Cebit trade show in Hanover,
Germany.

Streibich wants to establish a network of "niche" software companies that can share technical and marketing resources, and more. "What we're talking about is co-opetition," he said. "None of us can do it all alone but together we can develop competitive SOA offerings."

Streibich likened his SOA alliance to the Star Alliance in the airline industry, which helps carriers compete on a global scale.

Analysts agree that company size and depth of expertise will be crucial to establishing a position in the SOA market.

"The SOA market is wide open but IBM, Oracle and SAP will be big competitors," said Gartner Inc. analyst Massimo Pezzini.

Software AG already has experience in collaborating with partners through its CentraSite Community. The community is focused on bringing together the individual SOA skills of partners in areas such as security and business intelligence.

CentraSite is a registry and repository system that keeps track of SOA artifacts, including Web services. CentraSite was developed jointly by Software AG and Fujitsu Ltd.

At Cebit, Software AG announced new CentraSite Community members, including Novell Inc. and Alfabet AG.

Software AG will collaborate with Alfabet in developing a new application for SOA planning and governance.

At Cebit, Software AG also demonstrated a new service, SOA Value Assessment, which is designed to help companies identify areas in which SOA can deliver business benefits.

The company is also showing its Active Governance Framework (AGF), announced in February, which features a policy editor for SOA.

With AGF, developers can edit and enforce business and technical policies.


Source: http://pcworld.about.com/od/industrynews/Software-AG-plans-SOA-alliance.htm

Next-Generation Middleware Architecture

Oracle SOA Service Oriented Architecture News : Next-Generation Middleware Architecture

Fusion Middleware architecture for flexible, standards-based applications
During his Wednesday keynote at the JavaOne conference, Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian unveiled the next-generation architecture for Oracle Fusion Middleware—the world's fastest growing family of middleware products. This industry's first middleware architecture to support Grid computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and event-driven architecture (EDA) at "the core" delivers unprecedented flexibility, performance and scalability.
In addition, Oracle announced an enhanced Java application server and tools as well as a new development kit for Spring.

Key innovations include:

• Extreme processing and performance. In-memory data grid technology, from Oracle's recent acquisition of Tangosol, enables extreme transactions processing and scalability.
• SCA-based service infrastructure. A new service infrastructure, based on the service component architecture (SCA) standard, will offer a new composite application development framework with built-in policy enforcement points and optimized intra-component messaging.
• Complex Event Processing (CEP) for EDA. CEP will support high-volume, programmatic analysis of complex event patterns derived from multiple, independent event sources.
• Enhanced Java Application Server and Tools. Instrumental in defining key Java standards since its inception, Oracle realized that simplifying development with EJB 3.0 and JavaServer Faces (JSF) 1.2 is vital to the adoption of the next-generation Java Platform, Java EE 5.

Also announced were free technology previews of Oracle's new standards-based tools, including the Java EE 5 compatible Oracle Application Server (OC4J) 11g, Oracle JDeveloper 11g and Application Development Framework (ADF).

New Development Kit for Spring.
Because of its highly flexible, layered architecture, the popularity of Spring's open source continues to grow. To meet the requirements of developers using Oracle Java products in conjunction with Spring, Oracle is delivering a new development kit for Spring, including productivity tools, pre-packaged sample applications and how-to-guides.

Source: http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/next-generation-fusion-middleware.html

How You Talk about SOA service oriented architecture to the Business

How You Talk about SOA service oriented architecture to the Business

SOA service oriented architecture implementations thus far have been fairly small. For instance, according to this IT World article, the benchmarking non-profit APQC reports that 43 percent of its respondents report having at least one service oriented architecture SOA service in production, but the average is three. That would seem to corroborate what analysts and consultants are saying: Mostly, companies are doing proof-of-concept service oriented architecture SOA services rather than full-scale implementations.

Of course, this is destined to change. Already, I’m starting to see more focus on the question, “How should IT talk about service oriented architecture service oriented architecture SOA to the business?”

Good question. The smart money seems to be on: Whatever you do, don’t talk about the technology. Talk about what SOA can do for the business.

In this Linkedin.com question and answer, a self-described “IT representative to the business” asks “What does SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) mean to Business Folks?” A CTO responds, “First, don’t talk about SOA.” He continues on, adding a bit later:

I’m constantly frustrated by the excessive focus on the technology of SOA service oriented architecture at the expense of the real potential of service oriented architecture SOA to transform the way a company does business. And, almost all SOA projects come from the IT department and just talk about the technical/infrastructure pieces.

His response is well worth reading. I really like his point about not pushing business process automation when most companies still haven’t Web-enabled many, many legacy applications.

Microsoft employee Avinash Nicklas Chan Kumar Malik (Nick Malik) also recently tackled this question on his blog, Inside Architecture. He compares the way IT currently sells SOA to an architect trying to sell him on a house addition by talking about how easy it will be to add on a room or how he’ll use standard wood and wiring. Instead, the architect talked to him about aesethics, lifestyle and functionality. IT can take a lesson, he argues. Malik writes:

I’ve decided that the best way to “Sell SOA” to the business is not to sell SOA service oriented architecture to the business. Let’s talk about the aesthetics, the features, the speed and reliability, the automation of their business processes to allow them to focus and innovate where it counts. Let’s not talk about standard parts.

Both of these items make excellent points about how you can talk about service oriented architecture SOA.

That said, I’m going to respectfully disagree with the contention you shouldn’t talk about the technology aspects when you talk about SOA service oriented architecture.

Let me explain.

First, when you ask, “How do I talk to the business about service oriented architecture SOA,” what you really want to know is: “How do I convince business executives to spend money on retraining and new SOA tools — whether that’s middleware, development tools or new hardware? And then how do I explain why they should put up with the inevitable application deployment delays, increased testing and the numerous meetings with business managers and users as we shift to service-oriented architecture?”

And therein lies the problem. Much of the benefits of SOA service oriented architecture — agility, quicker deployments, less cost for development — won’t come immediately. And even if you could reap that ROI immediately, there’s still the credibility problem.

You see, IT has promised all of this before. And in recent years, the business has grown impatient with spending money on technology solutions that promise to fix business problems, only to find next year IT wants more money, again to fix the same problems.

Imagine if Malik’s architect came back and told Malik he was going to have to rebuild that house addition. Wouldn’t you want to know why? And if that architect said, “Because it will be better… and because the first room didn’t follow coding standards.” The architect would probably be fired. But let’s assume he isn’t. My guess is, Malik and anyone else in that position is suddenly going to be very interested in having conversation about standards and materials and foundations.

Plus, it’s a bit condescending to think business won’t understand the technology reasons behind this change. Real life isn’t like Greg the Architect: Business leaders don’t need to hear the words “ROI” to understand benefits of SOA service oriented architecture.

Of course, you shouldn’t start out the conversation by talking about the technical aspects of SOA service oriented architecture. Business value is definitely the place to begin. But be prepared to discuss services and explain why service oriented architecture SOA is better that EAI or standard development practices — my guess is, there will be questions.

Capitalising on SOA Service Oriented Architecture

Capitalising on SOA Service Oriented Architecture

In a world of rapidly evolving enterprise landscapes the ability to adapt to changing business needs is more crucial than ever. SOA Service Oriented Architecture is not only able to facilitate this but is also allowing organisations to standardise and unify business processes and align IT architecture with business drivers.

While many appreciate the theoretical benefits that are offered by Service Oriented Architecture SOA and web services they have either struggled to realise this potential or have resisted re-designing their architecture because of the perceived risks and costly overheads. However organisations that have successfully implemented Service Oriented Architecture SOA in conjunction with refining business processes are not only seeing direct benefits of agility, standardisation and interoperability, but are shaping their architecture to comply with the demands of the foreseeable future.

This conference will tackle both the strategic and technical aspects of designing and building components of a Service Oriented Architecture SOA and web services that will produce tangible business gains. It will also demonstrate measures that your organisation can take to identify and minimise associated risks. Topics to be explored include:

• Adopting Service Oriented Architecture SOA as a support tool for business processes
• Identifying services that will benefit your organisation
• Building services capable of achieving the desired results
• Evaluating whether to include an Enterprise Service Bus in your Service Oriented Architecture SOA
• Adopting and conforming to appropriate standards
• Appreciating the significance of Enterprise Architecture in a successful Service Oriented ArchitectureSOA