SOA is the future - but what exactly is it?
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Survey says business just doesn't 'get' it Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are the subject de jour with IT vendors, who have been using the term as if the concept has been totally understood by the buying audience and is well along the way to general implementation.â¦
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More process IBM has announced its Rational Software Delivery Platform 7.0 for desktops, to help developers design and deliver service oriented architectures (SOAs).â¦
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(InfoWorld) - As part of a new market strategy aimed at growth markets, business software vendor Software AG will focus on SOA (service-oriented architecture) products and services, and plans acquisitions to broaden its product portfolio and market share, company executives announced at a news conference Wednesday. The Darmstadt, Germany, software maker, whichÂ used to tag itself The XML Company, sees its future in helping businesses migrate their legacy IT systems to more flexible, SOA-enabled infrastructures, said Peter KÃ¼rpick, the member of the Software AG executive board responsible for research and development, Software AG offers a suite of products, including its main Crossvision application, that provide companies with the necessary tools to build SOA-based services and the interfaces to link them to other applications, KÃ¼rpick said. KÃ¼rpick pointed to the company's new Active Governance Framework (AGF) featuring an SOA policy editor that allows developers to edit and enforce business and technical policies. One of AGF's features is the capability to send alerts to business users when an application conflicts with an established policy. With its focus on SOA products and services, Software AG aims to double its sales to â¬1 billion ($1.3 billion) within the next five years, said CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich. While Software AG intends to "remain a product company," a huge share of its business will come from consulting services, said company spokesman Norbert Eder. Acquisitions, particularly a larger company in the U.S., will help increase sales and thus market share, according to Eder. Software AG is also keen to acquire smaller software companies that can broaden its SOA portfolio or provide access to new markets in Europe, he said. The company has set aside â¬700 million for acquisitions. At the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, next month, Software AG plans to provide more details about its SOA strategy, KÃ¼rpick said. The company is the initiator of the "SOA World" event to held at the trade show. The event will include a forum and exhibition by providers of SOA products and services.
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IBM Press&#8482; today announced publication of The  New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0, authored by Sandy  Carter, a book that advises companies on how to achieve competitive  advantage through a service oriented approach that directly links IT  with business objectives.
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In many respects, SOA is an evolution of the fundamental tenets governing component-based development (CBD). In this article, Bernhard Borges, Kerrie Holley and Ali Arsanjani from IBM discuss the relationship between CBD and SOA and a technique for performing SOA modeling, analysis, and design for services, where services are realized using components.
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Web applications are hot--and either destined to be the next big thing on the Web or the next bubble.
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(InfoWorld) - Heralding the most viable, "real-world" approach to building SOAs (service-oriented architectures)Â this week,Â MicrosoftÂ  unveiled new guidelines for partners create an enterprise service bus (ESB). Usually, BEA Systems and IBM beat the SOA drum the loudest, but Microsoft renamed its Business Process and Integration Conference for BizTalk partners "SOA and Business Process Conference" with the aim demonstrate that it, too, has a plan for helping customers build SOAs. Microsoft has had itsÂ business process integration product BizTalk since 2000, but it has not been as vocal as competitors BEA and IBM in discussing a comprehensive SOA strategy. SOA is the next generation of enterprise software architectures, in which applications and services within the IT system are loosely coupled and able to be integrated piecemeal to form custom, or "composite," applications from various components across the enterprise. Microsoft worked with partner Neudesic to provide sample code and documentation for using BizTalk Server to build an ESB, which Microsoft defines as a set of capabilities -- such as mediation, transformation and integration -- for connecting business processes and services throughout the organization, said Steven Martin, a Microsoft director of product management. The company also unveiled a new adapter for Extensible Markup Language-based BizTalk that enables customers to connect the product more easily to IBM mainframe and AS/400 systems. The technology, called the BizTalk Adapter for Host Systems, is based on technologies available in Microsoft's Host Integration Server product, which the company has had for some time, Martin said. John Devadoss, a Microsoft director of architecture, said it is still finding a lot of misconceptions about SOAs among its customers, who think they have to rearchitect their entire software infrastructure "from the top down" to build SOAs. On the contrary, Microsoft believes that SOAs are more successful if there is a "real-world business driver" behind the architecture, he said. "In the real world, the success stories we see are customers taking a pragmatic, middle-out approach," he said. "The only way to truly track to the needs of the business is to take small steps along the way. The mega projects are either big science projects that never get finished or they diverge from the needs of the business."ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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(InfoWorld) - The great thing about SOA is that when you add a service, you instantly increase the potential of any application that can consume that service. Today, Avaya threw a new set of VoIP services into the enterprise SOA mix in the form of its CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes) solution. For most enterprises, the benefits of VoIP have been limited to the cost savings of retiring legacy phone systems and the added productivity of a few voice/data applications -- almost exclusively for call centers. CEBP exposes an array of voice communications features as Web services, which can be called upon by any number of applications from IT operations to supply chain management. Avaya sees CEBP as a way for enterprises to optimize business processes and respond swiftly to events. For example, based on certain criteria, a temporary interruption at a manufacturing plant might cause SAP R/3 to ping CEBP, which would send an automated advisory message with a return receipt to the appropriate manager via phone, e-mail, or SMS. In the event of a total meltdown, the Notify & Conference feature could be invoked, initiating voice calls to a preset list of people and dropping them all into an emergency conference call. In other instances, CEBP could merely ensure that composite workflow applications, oft cited as a big payoff of SOA, aren't stopped in their tracks by people who aren't sitting at a computer and can't respond promptly. As Avaya senior vice president Stuart Wells puts it, "by bringing our innovation in advanced and open technologies to business processes, Avaya gives organizations the unique competitive advantage that can only arise with more intelligent communications." One customer, Whirlpool, has been experimenting with a pre-release version of CEBP for more than a year. Brian Murphy, director of e-services in Whirlpool's global development division, has already applied CEBP's array of services to IT processes, shortening response times. "If a system goes down ... that's an issue we want to be able to do something about in minutes, not hours. Straightaway, we want to be in action mode," he said. Avaya is not the first vendor to provide a Web services platform for voice communications capabilities. Last September, BlueNote Networks introduced its SessionSuite SOA Edition, designed to enable developers to embed telephony capabilities in a range of applications. But Avaya's large customer base and professional services group could help jump start the use of voice-based Web services. Whirlpool's Murphy, for one, is looking at expanding the use of CEBP in a number of areas, including supply chain management and manufacturing. "We're taking a strategic look at all parts of our business," he said.
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InfoWorld - Branching out in the SOA space, MuleSource will introduce Tuesday its Mule Galaxy software, an open source SOA governance platform with an integrated registry and repository.
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Graham Charters writes, in this new post on the IBM developerWorks PHP blog today, that the first release of their Service Component Architecture (v 0.1.0) has been released.    We've just made the first release of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) for PHP prototype available. SCA allows you to turn PHP classes into Web services by adding a few simple phpDocumentor-style annotations. SCA will automatically generate WSDL for these services when required.    SCA also uses the same annotations technique to allow PHP classes to declare dependencies on other Web services or PHP classes. At runtime it will then 'inject' proxies for these dependencies, which can then be used to call the Web services or classes    You can check out documentation for the project and some examples of how it works over on this page and a whitepaper here will give you the full scoop. If you're interested, be sure to check out the Google Group for the project too.
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If you hang around on web-related mailing lists long enough, you start getting the idea that the future is full of metadata. Now, this metadata may or may not be XML, or it may or may not be RDF or OWL or a dozen other technologies with impressive-sounding words like &ldquo;ontology&rdquo; in their names. It may or may not be the long-dreamt-of (and often derided) &ldquo;Semantic Web.&rdquo; In fact, it may or may not be a dozen different buzzwords, and it may or may not be a good thing. But whatever the future is, it will definitely be full of metadata; on this the experts agree.    To my mind there&rsquo;s a problem with this: the argument always seems to depend on technologies which don&rsquo;t exist or aren&rsquo;t quite ready yet, so it always falls back to talking about how things will be &ldquo;in the future,&rdquo; which may never get here. Luckily, there's an easy way to add oodles of metadata to your documents right this minute, without having to learn anything more complicated than trusty old HTML 4.01. If it catches on, &ldquo;the future&rdquo; might get here a lot sooner than expected.
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The Eclipse Foundation is developing an open source SOA framework intended for applications ranging from enterprise environments to embedded systems.
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Microsoft officials preached the company's Oslo computing vision Tuesday, which encompasses services deployment from the client to the cloud and making models a mainstream part of development.Officials discussed Oslo and related efforts in business process management and SOA at the Microsoft 2007 SOA and Business Process Conference in Redmond, Wash. The intent of the event is to make it easier to build applications that matter to business, according to the company.Oslo features two top-level points, said Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. "The first is we're doubling down on services," he said. "We've been working in services and [are] a leader on services and we're extending that from the client and making a huge bet on the cloud." Microsoft will host services itself, he said.?The second main point is making a platform that is fundamentally model-driven. Microsoft officials expounded on a new modeling tool and a repository to break down application silos. A modeling language will be featured that interoperates with other modeling languages such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) for Web Services.Microsoft technologies shown included an application composer to map application parts to systems.Also emphasized Tuesday was the company's Internet Service Bus concept for SOA, featuring a hosted platform for building composite applications, connecting disparate systems, and providing communication between end points. Microsoft's Internet Service Bus has encompassed hosted building-block services to connect systems across business units and partners as well as .Net Framework extensions.An attendee lauded Microsoft for finally countering rivals by detailing its SOA efforts."I think that prior to this point, it's been hard using Microsoft SOA technologies in competitive situations with other vendors like IBM and Tibco and now what I see is the kind of vision and platform that we need to have in place in order to implement a full SOA [implementation] on the Microsoft stack," said Sam Gentile, principal consultant with Neudesic, a Microsoft technology platform partner.But an industry analyst was less impressed with Microsoft's Oslo vision."I think it made sense from the aspiration perspective, but I thought there's still a lot of details left to be clarified," said Dwight Davis, analyst with Ovum. One detail Davis wanted was whether the new modeling tool would work with pre-existing tools.Also, some of Microsoft's discussion sounded familiar to the company's Dynamic IT plan, Davis said. (Microsoft has noted in a press statement that Oslo builds on the model-driven and service-enabled principals of Microsoft Dynamic IT.)Microsoft's plan also sounded akin to the company?s Dynamic Systems Initiative for agile businesses, which was not even mentioned today, Davis noted.Microsoft also did not mention its previously discussed SML (Service Modeling Language) technology for modeling complex IT services and systems, Davis said. "Where was SML today?" Davis asked.Oslo will not involve new products but instead incorporates Oslo-based functionality into new products, such as a version of Visual Studio currently referred to as visual Studio "10."
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My punchline is better than theirs Rich Green, Sun Microsystems' new software chief, thinks his rivals are "hung up" on service oriented architectures (SOA), and are failing to grasp the bigger picture.â¦
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On the IBM developerWorks site, there's a new post talking about a new Service Component Architecture module that's been released over on the PECL site - SCA_SDO.   We've just made our first release of SCA on the PECL repository. The code has been added into what was the SDO project and which has now been imaginatively renamed to SCA_SDO (you won't believe how much thought went into that...).    Main features include:  inclusion of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) component new PEAR packaging to install SCA and SDO as peer directories (PEAR/SCA and PEAR/SDO) new function in SDO_DAS_Relational to support multiple root data objects new function in SDO_DAS_XML to support CDATA sections (not yet complete)  To find out more about the project, check out its homepage.
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(InfoWorld) - As any developer can tell you, creating interoperability between SOA components and existing IT environments isnât trivial. It requires a lot of effort and coding. But IBM says it has the antidote for the IT headache: composite business services in the form of wrappers around existing IT applications. Big Blueâs strategy to create reusable SOA services is largely built around technologies and tools that the company received from its August acquisition of Webify Solutions, a vendor of SOA software and services. Webify provides hundreds of industry-specific, prebuilt standards-based accelerators, tools, and frameworks. Its offerings help solve business problems that are specific to a given industry, such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance for the health care industry and ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) standards in the insurance industry. Within IBM, Webifyâs technology provides the basis for WebSphere Business Services Fabric (IBMâs SOA platform for modeling, assembly, and deployment of business services), says Brett MacIntyre, vice president for composite services development at IBM.                                                     âWebify (software) has given us the fabric, the view across the industry of common services used within the industry, and the tools and the methods with which to build these composite business services,â MacIntyre says. Webify also brought relationships with customers in the health care and insurance industries, and a portfolio of about 12 composite business services in the insurance and health care industries, MacIntyre says. Composite business services built by IBM will interoperate through the standard framework from Webify, with ontologies and data models associated with an industry added on top of the WebSphere Business Services Fabric to create a particular component, MacIntyre says. âFor example, a core data model that the insurance companies in the U.S. work with is part of the overall business fabric,â he says. Webify tools, processes and methodologies will also play a key role at SOA Solutions Centers in Beijing and Pune, India, says Jeby Cherian, the head of IBMâs Global Business Solutions Center, one of three organizations IBM set up to create reusable software assets.
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InfoWorld - As part of a new market strategy aimed at growth markets, business software vendor Software AG will focus on SOA (service-oriented architecture) products and services, and plans acquisitions to broaden its product portfolio and market share, company executives announced at a news conference Wednesday.