Vordel: Centralized Policy Management Infrastructure

Policy management is quickly becoming a core need when considering the implementation of operational and effective SOA implementations. However, many people don’t consider policy management until it’s too late, and difficult to retrofit. Indeed, the use and management of policies provide the central control mechanism that provides clear value when considering the return on investment of SOA. . Policies are as important to SOA as Services themselves, and they should be managed throughout their lifecycles as such.

Policy management requires operational lifecycle support, like any other development effort. Such management includes the migration through development, testing, staging, and finally the operations of the policy in the production environment. Moreover, policy management requires other facilities, including centralized logging of all critical metrics gathered during the policy operations, allowing the managers of the SOA implementation to gather key data points used to enhance operational efficiencies.

Skyway Software: A Collaborative, Model-Driven Approach to Service Development

As companies look to migrate to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and adopt Service-oriented approaches in their organizations, the biggest challenge is often aligning, educating, and informing the IT teams on how to best make the transition. Too often, the business desires for Service Orientation outpace the capabilities of IT to deliver on the SOA vision. As such, companies often seek incremental approaches that get the organization closer to their SOA goals without requiring that they bite off too much at once.

While an iterative approach does not necessarily guarantee that a company will realize all the benefits of SOA, such as loose coupling, composability of Services, Service reuse, and increased agility, taking a step-wise approach to SOA can significantly increase a company’s chances of realizing long-term SOA success.

Skyway Software’s model-driven approach to Service development helps to transition firms that have well-developed, but entrenched experience in traditional software development to an iterative, Service-oriented approach that can help companies get the benefits they so desire without necessitating dramatic changes to the IT status quo.

alfabet: Applying Enterprise Architecture Management to SOA

ZapThink’s perspective on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is that SOA is essentially a set of Enterprise Architecture (EA) best practices, linking the disciplines of SOA and EA together. As organizations make progress with their SOA initiatives, they generally come to agree with this perspective. As a consequence, one of the primary benefits of the “SOA as EA” perspective is the ability to leverage EA Management (EAM) tools for SOA initiatives.

Most EAM tools, however, do not have capabilities specific to SOA. planningIT from alfabet is an important exception. In addition to a full breadth of collaborative EA modules that cover the gamut of IT planning activities, planningIT also offers some specific capabilities that help with the planning of SOA initiatives as well, including tools for planning reusable Services that meet the needs of the business.

Corizon: Leveraging User Interface Services for Rapid Application Creation

ZapThink frequently speaks about Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs), which ZapThink defines as compositions of Services that implement business processes. While the common context for discussions of SOBAs is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), from the user’s perspective, in many ways the application is the user interface (UI). As a result, achieving the user empowerment promise of SOBAs depends in large part on supporting flexible UI creation and enhancement.

There are many tools on the market now that facilitate the creation of user interfaces for SOBAs, but one company, Corizon, stands alone with its UI Services approach. UI Services are an abstracted representation of an element of UI functionality that users can compose into applications. By building and supporting UI Services, Corizon focuses on where the business user lives–at the user interface. Corizon addresses the challenge of enabling IT and lines of business to work together by supporting iterative development and incremental innovation at the UI by leveraging UI Services in a Service-oriented manner.

Ramco Systems: Service-Oriented Business Process Delivery

A primary reason many enterprises seek to implement Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is to enable flexible business processes that respond to changing business needs. One category of emerging software solutions that companies need to achieve this goal is a Business Process Platform that provides an environment for users to create business Services and compose them into Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs).

Ramco Systems, a new entrant in the SOA marketplace, has recently announced such a solution as part of their Business Process Delivery System which enables organizations to take a model-driven approach to Service creation and composition. The Business Process Delivery System provides over one thousand pre-configured business Services, business intelligence capabilities, and SOBAs for vertical industries offer flexibility and agility with respect to both infrastructure choices as well as processes.

Web Age Solutions: Deep SOA Training for a Wide Range of Audiences

Companies are quickly realizing that doing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) right means more than simply picking a set of tools and implementing some code. Indeed, companies are now clamoring for more information and guidance on SOA best practices, which has led to an upswing in the market for Enterprise Architecture-focused training and mentorship.

To address a growing demand, Web Age Solutions has put together a comprehensive SOA training program for managers, architects, and developers. Some highlights from this curriculum include high-level executive training, hands-on technical courses for both developers and testing personnel, and deep best practice instruction for architects.Their SOA courseware falls into four general tracks: SOA discovery, SOA strategy, SOA application development, and SOA optimization, enabling Web Age to offer a set of courses for any individual or organization who wishes to improve their knowledge of and capabilities with SOA.

Online Business Systems: SOA For Justice & Public Safety

Online Business Systems (Online) is a midsize professional services firm that has built a business for over twenty years by focusing on aligning business needs with integration-centric IT solutions. Now, they are leveraging Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) best practices as well to add a new level of agility to their integration offering for many different industries.

In particular, Online has been able to leverage SOA best practices within their Integrated Justice & Public Safety practice, which serves public responders, courts, and other parts of the justice system. These clients have particularly stringent integration requirements, due to the dynamic nature of law enforcement, the requirement for high levels of security and confidentiality, and the diverse, heterogeneous set of agencies who must work together. Online’s SOA capabilities, combined with their integration skills and business focus have enabled them to build many successful implementations in the justice and public safety arena.

webMethods: Combining Business Process Management and SOA to Support Dynamic Processes

Familiar to enterprise IT as an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) vendor, webMethods has fully reworked their product line into a fully featured, process focused SOA platform. webMethods Fabric 7.0 now offers codefree process creation based on Service composition, process visibility, SOA governance and lifecycle management.

webMethods Fabric 7.0 provides both business integration and optimization capabilities. Fabric integrates, assembles and optimizes business processes enabling customers to leverage their existing assets to increase business process productivity.

Enterprise architects and IT managers who are looking to implement process-focused SOA in their organizations should shed any preconceived notions about webMethods and take a new look at Fabric’s comprehensive SOA infrastructure capabilities.

BlueNote Networks: Converging Voice and Application Services

As Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) expands in usage and viability across enterprise IT, an increasing range of business processes, systems, and modes of user interaction are coming to be thought of in the Service-oriented perspective. In particular, most enterprises depend as much on their voice-based interactions with customers, employees, partners, and stakeholders as they do other forms of interaction. Therefore, it only makes sense to consider how SOA approaches can leverage voice capabilities as Services throughout corporate processes and applications.

A champion and pioneer in the space of interactive communications, BlueNote Networks is heralding this era of voice-enabled SOA through its SessionSuite™ Business Communications Platforms. These software products enable businesses to consider voice in a more complete fashion, leveraging it both within existing business processes as well as enabling a new class of voice-enabled business processes.

Hyfinity: Enabling Rich, Composite Web Applications

Web application development is becoming increasingly complex, time consuming, and brittle. For many organizations, the addition of Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies like Ajax look promising, but actually introduce further complexity into an already burdened application development process. In fact, traditional code-centric approaches to building applications aren’t up to the task of keeping up with the new generation of rich, collaborative applications known broadly as Web 2.0.

What organizations seek is a declarative, document-centric apporach to Internet application creation that leverages Services in the context of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Only by combining the agility that SOA provides with the rich user interfaces of RIAs can companies evolve their Web applications in a flexible, cost-effective manner.

Rising to the challenge of providing adequate tooling for this new class of application is Hyfinity, which offers a combination platform and studio environment for building RIAs that consume and compose Web Services in the context of SOA. Hyfinity combines the best of both worlds — rich user interfaces and loosely coupled, agile Services in a straightforward, declarative environment that increases time to value and productivity for enterprise application creators.