Articles by SOA World Magazine News Desk

Ricoh and IBM Form Global Strategic Alliance Supporting SOA

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:30:00 EST

Ricoh announced a Global Strategic Alliance with IBM that will provide customers with document solutions. As part of the alliance, the companies will first launch a new Ricoh offering, Document Security and Management Services (DSMS) in the United States. The DSMS offering includes Assessment & Deployment, End User Services, Managed Services, Security, Green Office, and Enterprise Content Management services, which will be delivered by Ricoh Document Solutions and Services Division and IBM's Global Technology Services.

Wipro Develops Integrated Police Information System Using SOA

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:30:00 EST

Wipro Infotech has developed an integrated Police Information System, an end-to-end online application software which covers activities related to the day-to-day functioning of police departments, including the back-end administrative processes of general administration, finance and stores. The processes have been automated to ease the tasks of administration and record keeping, thereby bringing in operational efficiency throughout the police department.

SYS-CON White Paper: Message-Driven SOA

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:15:00 EST

In this paper, Steve Craggs of Lustratus Research discusses a new approach to delivering pragmatic, SOA-based value, combining some of the best features of SOA with event-driven principles – message-driven SOA. Message-driven SOA has its roots in the ongoing requirement many companies have to improve integration across different business disciplines and systems, but by bringing in aspects of SOA it offers an easier and more cost-effective response to this need while providing additional SOA benefits such as faster time to market and improved business visibility of operations. At the same time, message-driven SOA offers a tactical response to immediate needs that also remains consistent with the longer-term strategic goals of full SOA adoption. Click here to download this paper now!

SYS-CON White Paper: Service-Oriented Data Access

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 13:45:00 EST

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources and data to meet the changing needs of the business. Implementing SOA depends upon the IT organization being able to build interoperable, robust, reusable, and composable Services that abstract the underlying application functionality and data in the organization. To put this building block vision of SOA into practice requires a solid technical foundation, which includes a persistence layer that facilitates interaction with heterogeneous data sources that store and provide the structured and unstructured information that the enterprise runs upon. To learn more about service oriented data access and how your company can best implement SOA, read this White Paper by SYS-CON and Data Direct. Click here to download the White Paper.

SYS-CON White Paper: Data Direct on the Legacy of SOA

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:00:00 EST

Today's business imperative for IT is to do more with less, and to respond to ever-changing business requirements efficiently and inexpensively. It is vital, therefore, for organizations to get the most possible value out of legacy technology. The movement to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) demands that we reconsider the value of legacy and enhance its continued benefit to the business. Download the White Paper now to learn more. Click here to access the White Paper, “The Mainframe as a First Class SOA Participant.”

SOA World Case Study: DataDirect Shadow Financial Services Firm

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:00:00 EST

A global financial services firm deployed DataDirect Shadow and its mainframe Web services technology at the early stages of its service oriented architecture (SOA) adoption. The case study discusses how this strategy enabled the company to leverage existing mainframe assets while increasing developer productivity and the ability to deliver new applications to customers. Click here to view the case study.

SYS-CON Webcast: CMDB – A Journey, Not a Destination

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:15:00 EST

Hear how many leading organizations have implemented CMDB’s and the practical approach that has helped their firms: Demonstrate measured benefits against the business case throughout each phase of the project, and select the appropriate CMDB tool to meet process, people and organizational requirements To learn more click here and access the webcast now!

SYS-CON White Paper: Self-Service Portal Framework Using SOA

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 07:45:00 EST

MultiPlan’s business partners and customers needed automated access to client and patient information. MultiPlan initially provided a self-service portal using aging Cold Fusion applications with Oracle databases as the data store. This solution lacked the scalability and flexibility to integrate to enterprise systems or re-use components to develop new applications faster. In addition, their current system was unable to support Rich Internet Application (RIA) development challenges.

SYS-CON White Paper: Bluenog Reduces Development Costs with SOA

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 07:15:00 EST

The pressure to reduce the costs of operations and future development has become a fact of life for today’s financial services institutions. To meet this challenge, one of the top 20 U.S. banks sought to break away from their historically turnkey, ‘black box’ applications. They wanted to provide an open and integrated approach to IT that would give them more control over how they interacted with and enhanced their business applications. An internal group was formed to investigate and define how the bank should consider using Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) to modernize its infrastructure. Their paramount goal was to create a road map to tangible business value and ROI. Click here to download Bluenog's White Paper now to learn more about how this bank integrated SOA into their IT approach.

SYS-CON White Paper: JMS Performance Benchmarks

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 07:15:00 EST

This paper presents a performance analysis of publish/subscribe messaging throughput of FioranoMQ, SonicMQ, TIbco EMS and ActiveMQ. This analysis provides a head-to-head comparison of these products designed to illustrate the products' relative performance characteristics for several messaging scenarios. Download JMS Performance Benchmarks now and learn more! Click here to download!

Epicor 9 Wins Product of the Year

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 08:00:00 EST

Epicor announced Tuesday that Epicor 9, a next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, has won the 2008 Product of the Year Award from Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. Epicor 9 combines Web 2.0 concepts with Epicor True SOA, a collaborative business architecture that manages the flow of processes across an enterprise. Epicor was chosen to receive the award by the editors of Customer Interaction Solutions, who considered the nominees’ vision and leadership in the industry.

SYS-CON White Paper: Enabling Collaborative Content Management with SOA

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 07:15:00 EST

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is home to IEEE Xplore, a research and publications e-commerce site. A portion of the content for IEEE Xplore was previously provided by content owners for management by the technical staff. These content owners were non-technical users who wanted the ability to easily manage and edit content for this high revenue producing web portal. The old process did not give them the flexibility to do so. Content changes were delivered to the technical staff, who then modified the data for consumption on the IEEE Xplore website. IEEE needed a cost effective alternative to address their integration and content management challenge. Click here to download Bluenog’s White Paper now, and learn how IEEE addressed this challenge.

XAware Releases XAware 5.2 for SOA

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 01:00:00 EST

XAware has announced the general availability of XAware 5.2, the open source data integration solution for creating and managing composite data services. Working closely with its user community, XAware has included upgrades that give developers new design options that make it easier to design and deliver data services for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. The most notable addition to XAware 5.2 is the data-first design feature. Leveraging two important aspects of the Eclipse Data Tools Project, Connection Profiles and Data Source Explorer, XAware users can now create data services by starting with data sources. This option, often known as bottom-up design

SOALogix Included in Magic Quadrant for SOA Composite Application Projects

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 07:15:00 EST

SOALogix has announced it has been positioned by Gartner in the niche players quadrant in the 'Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for SOA Composite Application Projects'(1) report. "SOALogix is very pleased to be included in Gartner's latest research involving SOA infrastructure for composite application projects," said Rex G. Ahlstrom, President & CEO of SOALogix. "Our primary focus as a company has been delivering technologies that simplify integration.

Four Soft Listed on IBM SOA Business Catalog

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 13:30:00 EST

Four Soft has announced that it has been listed on the IBM Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Business Catalog, after completing IBM’s SOA technical validation process. The IBM SOA Business Catalog is an online directory of reusable SOA content that has been validated to perform with IBM SOA Foundation products. Adhering to IBM’s technical and business framework, Four Soft software products – 4S eLog (warehouse management) and 4S eTrans (freight and transportation management) were integrated successfully.

SOA World Whitepaper "Excelling in the SOA Red Zone"

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:39:00 EST

AgilePath released a new SOA whitepaper Tuesday entitled "Excelling in the SOA Red Zone." The whitepaper describes an idealized SOA Adoption Lifecycle Model and the necessary SOA adoption phases for a successful SOA initiative, while also highlighting high risk SOA adoption stages where initiatives are often prone to failure. This is what AgilePath calls the SOA Red Zone. AgilePath CEO, Eric A. Marks, stated, "We hope that 'Excelling in the SOA Red Zone' will help organizations avoid the pitfalls of the SOA adoption through better SOA planning and execution, especially in a challenging economy."

ILOG JRules to Automate Underwriting Process for Aviva Canada

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:20:00 EST

ILOG has announced that Aviva Canada selected ILOG JRules to automate its underwriting process for personal lines. With the new BRMS-based platform, which will support Aviva's partners and customers, the carrier expects to achieve speed-to-market gains by being able to implement rule changes that govern certain underwriting processes in days or real-time and with rule execution occurring in milliseconds.

Active Endpoints Joins Web Services Test Forum

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:00:00 EST

Active Endpoints has announced it will collaborate with 15 of the world's leading companies on an open community to improve software interoperability, resulting in improving the quality of web services standards. The ultimate goal of the Web Services Test Forum (WSTF) is to identify interoperability issues as early as possible in order to eliminate obstacles to adopting web services. Customer-based scenarios will be developed to test or validate applications and services in a multi-vendor environment, dramatically reducing the IT and financial burdens traditionally required for in-house testing.

Prolifics Appoints Kadeer Beg as Chief Technology Officer

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:30:00 EST

Prolifics has announced that Kadeer Beg has been promoted to the position of Chief Technology Officer. Prior to becoming CTO, Beg held a senior management position at the company since 2006, as Practice Director for the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) group within the company, a thriving group representing over 60% of Prolifics’ annual revenues.

Sensedia Drives Value from SOA Software Projects

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:35:00 EST

Sensedia has launched operations in the United States with a focus on growing its global presence. With several Fortune 1000 clients in the U.S. and Brazilian market, Sensedia is already positioned for continued growth. By 2010, Sensedia estimates that its sales in the U.S. market could represent at least 50 percent of its revenues. Sensedia's products push companies to adopt measurable, cost-saving strategies for SOA implementations and the reuse of software development assets.

ActiveVOS 6.0.2 Reduces Bottlenecks in Process Performance

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:40:00 EST

Active Endpoints has announced the general availability of ActiveVOS 6.0.2, in response to ever increasing demands for improved process performance and efficiencies. ActiveVOS is an all-in-one, 100% standards-based orchestration and business process management system (BPM) that permits developers, business analysts and enterprises to develop and manage true services-oriented architecture (SOA)-based applications.

Clerity Introduces New Legacy Modernization and SOA Solutions

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:30:00 EST

Clerity Solutions has introduced new software and services that enable legacy mainframe applications and rehosted workloads to play strategic roles in SOA and Web Services initiatives. Building on a heritage of maximizing the value of core IT assets while lowering total cost of ownership, Clerity Service Builder and Clerity Web Connect allow organizations to easily expose legacy assets as secure Web Services and rapidly transform inflexible screen-based applications into modern, user-friendly Web applications.

Intel Presents General Session at SYS-CON’s SOA World Conference & Expo

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:30:00 EST

"SOA evolves in a set of micro domains," stated Intel's Joshua Painter, as he examined the state of SOA practices at SOA World Conference & Expo, in San Jose, CA. Despite the many instances of SOA that are emerging within the global 2000 today, the ability to leverage common services and a common metadata layer in a secure and scalable manner is paramount, but rarely addressed.

OpenSpan and TIBCO Team on Desktop Integration for SOA and BPM

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:15:00 EST

OpenSpan and TIBCO have announced a technology and business partnership designed to extend TIBCO solutions to desktop environments. The partnership will enable TIBCO Service-Oriented Architecture, Business Process Management and Business Optimization solutions to more rapidly integrate with desktop applications without requiring changes to those desktop applications. “The OpenSpan technology helps our joint customers service and event enable any desktop application without changing the code and with nearly zero impact to that application,” said Tom Laffey, executive vice president, products & technology at TIBCO.

SOA World Conference & Expo Session to Discuss How Social Governance Brings Viability to Web 2.0

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:00:00 EST

SOA brings together people, not just software. That’s why integrating Web 2.0 concepts into a SOA—such as comments, feeds, ratings, tags, and automatic search alerts—holds so much promise for breaking down business silos and enabling many people to work together for the first time. However, the unfettered communications associated with consumer Web 2.0 also need to be more controlled once they move into an enterprise SOA. IT professionals require social governance that balances the agility enabled by Web 2.0 capabilities with adherence to policies, visibility into changes, security, and access control.

XAware to Speak at SOA World Conference & Expo

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:45:00 EST

XAware has announced that Kirstan Vandersluis, founder and chief scientist, will be a featured speaker at the 14th International SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 West to be held November 19-21, 2008 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif. Mixing and mashing multiple data sources, all of different formats, into something that makes sense is a headache for software architects.

SOA Pioneer Linthicum Keynoting Today at SYS-CON's 14th International SOA World Conference & Expo in Silicon Valley

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:35:00 EST

David Linthicum, the highly popular SOA thought leader and practitioner, will be keynoting in San Jose, CA, on November 19 at the SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 West. 'While everyone wants to do SOA right the first time, the typical results are not always stellar,' says Linthicum. 'The pitfalls of building any complex architecture, including SOA,' he adds, 'are something that the SOA practitioners must contend with, and most are ill-equipped.'

CA to Support Maturing Federation Market Needs

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:00:00 EST

CA has announced the planned release of additions and advancements in its Identity and Access Management product portfolio, including CA Federation Manager, a new product designed to ease the deployment and management of federated partnerships; an enhanced CA SOA Security Manager; and an integrated solution for Secure Web Business Enablement that will feature multiple CA Identity and Access Management products including CA Federation Manager and the enhanced CA SOA Security Manager. “As organizations’ IT operations have grown to be more Web-based, CA has been there to help secure and manage that part of their operation, which has become critical to their business success,” said Dave Hansen, corporate senior vice president and general manager, CA Security Management.

Lead Architect at Oracle Fusion Middleware Speaking This Week at SYS-CON's 14th International SOA World Conference & Expo in Silicon Valley

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:45:00 EST

Many times shipped BPEL processes need to be customized at a customer site or at various departments of enterprises. "Such customizations need to be retained in subsequent upgrades," notes Khanderao Kand, a Lead Architect for Oracle Fusion Middleware at Oracle. Kand will be giving a breakout session this week on "Extensibility, Customizations, and Life Cycle Management of BPEL Processes" at SYS-CON's 14th International SOA World Conference & Expo in San Jose, California.

iTKO to Present LISA Eclipse Edition at SYS-CON's SOA World Conference & Expo

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:00:00 EST

The new LISA Eclipse Edition offers deep integration with many aspects of the platform, including the IDE, Source Control, Lifecycle Management, SWT interface elements, and other tools that operate inside of Eclipse. LISA test case documents can be stored and executed within the workflow of any Eclipse-based development project.

Intel Named "Gold Sponsor" of SYS-CON's SOA World Conference & Expo, November 19-21, San Jose, CA

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:00:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that the leading global SOA, Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Open Source technology provider Intel named "Gold Sponsor" of SYS-CON's SOA World Conference & Expo which will take place November 19-21, 2008, at the Fairmont Hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley, in San Jose, California. Intel SOA Products division is part of Intel's Software and Solutions Group, a worldwide Intel organization with a strategic focus on enabling technologies. The SOA Products division delivers innovative platform technologies that are optimized for speed and performance through Intel's multi-core processors and servers. Learn more: http://www.intel.com/software/soae.

SAP and CA Ships Diagnostics Application by CA Wily

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:00:00 EST

Further demonstrating continued evidence that the SAP ecosystem strategy delivers additional choices, value and flexibility for customers, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) and CA, Inc. (Nasdaq: CA) today announced a global reseller agreement that will enable SAP to resell the CA Wily Introscope(R) solution as SAP(R) Extended Diagnostics by CA Wily, a comprehensive application performance management solution that helps to ensure mission-critical Web applications and Web services meet customers' business and performance goals. The announcement was made at SAP(R) TechEd 2008 Bangalore, being held Nov. 12-14, in Bangalore, India.

Active Endpoints Announces "SOA" Contest

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:00:00 EST

Active Endpoints has announced a contest for the 2008 holiday season. Bring SOA Home for the Holidays offers evaluators of the ActiveVOS visual orchestration system for SOA and BPM applications the chance to win one of three Lenovo IdeaPad netbooks. The contest rules are simple. Evaluators visit www.soaholiday.com to register for a free, supported 30-day trial of ActiveVOS. This automatically makes them eligible for the contest.

Data Modeling in the SOA Age

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:32:00 EST

Once upon a time data modeling played a central role in the process of developing applications. Thus far in the SOA era, there has been a heavy emphasis on process, and data has all-too-often been lost in the SOA shuffle. In this session, Mike Carey presents a data model for SOA - i.e., a service-oriented data model. This model formalizes the notion of a data service, modeling data in SOA as a layer of interrelated data services. The session will explain the key components of this model, including a taxonomy of data service operation types, a mechanism for capturing the entities that the data services are "about", and an approach to modeling relationships in SOA.

How to Transition to SOA Successfully

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:26:00 EST

For the last month Brad Brown, CTO of TUSC, has been interviewing countless companies on their status of venturing into the world of SOA. Some companies have been doing "SOA" for more than 5 years, but a great many companies haven't even started down the SOA path. Brad has been talking about Web services (what he would call a lightweight SOA implementation) for more than 5 years now which is now known in the industry as Agile SOA. SOA Adoption is a journey with many paths. One of the journeys is the understanding where these services are coming from and Heterogeneity is Permanent. There are three areas that Automated Web service Generation by a tool makes good business sense for SOA. The exposure of Legacy systems as Web services. Legacy systems are not going away anytime soon, and companies need the ability to offer this critical data as a service.

DataDirect Technologies to Deliver Keynote at Leading Data Services Event

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:25:00 EST

Data Services World brings together experts in databases, data warehousing, business intelligence, enterprise computing and Internet computing to discuss new architecture considerations and technologies for accessing, integrating and processing data from heterogeneous data sources. As more organizations implement Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), Web-Oriented Architectures (WOA) or cloud computing initiatives they find themselves with a multitude of business services which need to access enterprise data. With all modern computing architectures, the need for robust technologies for data access and data integration has become more critical than ever before. The concept of data services is emerging as an approach for addressing data access challenges in SOA and a critical component of successful strategic initiatives.

Bridging Technology and Community for SOA

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:46:00 EST

SOA is about people as much as technology. This session will demonstrate how adding a layer of social (or "Web 2.0") features - things like tags, comments, and syndication feeds - to your SOA infrastructure can provide fertile ground to help grow a vibrant and connected community of developers, businesspeople, and technologists. We'll show you how a social registry/repository can enable both grass-roots development and CIO-pleasing governance, all with standard REST interfaces. And because we can directly connect SOA components and metadata with the human community creating them, the relationships of both the software and the people can be enriched.

DataServices World 2008 West: SOA, WOA and Cloud Computing - The New Frontier for Data Services

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:35:00 EST

Data services, contends Rob Steward, Vice President of Research and Development at DataDirect Technologies, are critical to the predominant and emerging architectures we're embracing for building new systems. "Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a standard enterprise architecture and Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) is enabling organizations to pull together data from multiple sources and services," notes Steward, who will be presenting in the Keynote Hall at The Fairmont Hotel on November 20, 2008. "Cloud computing is an architecture that provides high-performance computing, massive data storage and scalability at commodity pricing," he adds.

DataServices World 2008 West: IBM's Malaika to Present on SOA, WOA, Cloud and XML Data

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:20:00 EST

XML end-to-end architectures are a natural follow-on to SOA: XML for the user interface, XML for data interchange, and XML for storage. Universal Services are a set of database operations, including insert, update, delete, and query, that expose stored XML as Web service operations.

DataServices World 2008 West: m2mi CEO Geoff Brown to Reveal the Key to Scalable Data Services

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:10:00 EST

How can security standards such as Open Authorization and Semantics be used to bind Cloud-based services to form a robust trust model? The answer to this question will be given by Geoff Brown, Founder & CEO of m2mi Corporation, in a breakout session at DataServices World 2008 West in San Jose, CA. Brown will focus on the use case of GlobalLockBox.com, one of the most comprehensive cloud-based applications available today - spanning the Apple iPhone through to the desktop and finally large scale servers.