Digital Evolution Evolves Into SOA

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC, in Waltham, Mass., said, “By renaming itself there’s pretty much no doubt as to what market they are focusing on. [But while] it’s clearly focused on SOA, it’s not just management and security anymore but, rather, the infrastructure required to make SOA work.”

“Also, the markets for SOA are still consolidating significantly,” Schmelzer said. “It’s down to about three or four vendors in the Web services management space, and that might further consolidate. We’re seeing the same trends in security, process and metadata management. With a moniker like SOA Software, the company will probably be looking to be the acquirer rather than be consolidated out of the space.”

Read more at: eWeek

Digital Evolution Changes Name, Becomes SOA Software

“Service-Oriented Architecture has rapidly become an absolute requirement for most enterprises,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst, ZapThink, LLC. “By making this name change, SOA Software has clearly shown their commitment to the market, its customers and product excellence. We are excited to see the traction the company continues to get in the market.”

Read more at: SOA Software Press Release

Digital Evolution Evolves into SOA Software

“Service-Oriented Architecture has rapidly become an absolute requirement for most enterprises,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst, ZapThink, LLC. “By making this name change, SOA Software has clearly shown their commitment to the market, its customers, and product excellence. We are excited to see the traction the company continues to get in the market.”

Read more at: eBizQ.net

Digital Evolution Renames Itself SOA Software

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst at Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC, said, “By renaming itself SOA Software, there’s pretty much no doubt as to what market they are focusing on. It’s clearly focused on SOA, but it’s not just management and security anymore, but rather the infrastructure required to make SOA work.”

eWEEK.com Special Report: Service-Oriented Architecture

“Also, the markets for SOA are still consolidating significantly,” Schmelzer added. “It’s down to about three or four vendors in the Web services management space, and that might further consolidate.

“We’re seeing the same trends in security, process and metadata management. With a moniker like SOA Software, the company will probably be looking to be the acquirer rather than be consolidated out of the space.”

Read more at: eWeek

Digital Evolution Introduces Industry’s First XML VPN for .NET

“Companies are increasingly using Microsoft .NET-based Web services for business-to-business interactions,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink, LLC. “Tapping into this rapid growth, Digital Evolution’s XML VPN for .NET will significantly add to the capabilities of the .NET platform by helping organizations manage the provisioning and security of partner communications.”

Read more at: Digital Evolution Press Release

Securing .NET B2B Web Services

“Companies are increasingly using Microsoft .NET-based Web services for business-to-business interactions,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. “Tapping into this rapid growth, Digital Evolution’s XML VPN for .NET will significantly add to the capabilities of the .NET platform by helping organizations manage the provisioning and security of partner communications.”

Read more at: WS-Journal

High Performance and Appliance Approaches for XML

Increasingly organizations are seeking to find solutions that can transparently monitor XML traffic on the network and apply business rules or corporate IT policies such as security, routing, performance, management, transformation, and end-point connection provisioning without adversely impacting network performance or burdening their already over-stretched IT departments.

Because XML traffic is content-oriented, rather than protocol-oriented, solutions responsible for securing XML traffic must make decisions based upon the content of the messages, rather than the protocols that underlie those messages. However, XML is a huge bandwidth, processor, and storage hog. XML processing tasks such as XSL transformation, schema validation, XPath-based classification, XML security, and intelligent routing are inherently processing-intensive, placing a significant burden on server infrastructure that may not be optimized to perform these tasks.

As a result, there is a need for approaches that seek to provide the content-level functionality required of today’s XML and Web Services solutions but also provide the high level of performance needed to effectively run these solutions in production. The result of this need is the evolution of XML appliances, specialized chip-based solutions, and optimized software approaches that aim to ensure XML-related functionality without performance degradation. This report follows the evolution of the XML appliance markets, and the emergence of new classes of solutions dealing with processing XML-based content at wire speed.

Tools promise to extend Web Services

The XML VPN will secure content at the application level, as opposed to IP-based VPNs that provide network-level security, said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. IP-based VPNs can secure the packets while unknowingly letting malicious content into the network, he said.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

IBM commits further to SOA with new management practice

“This news is significant because it is an indication that 2005 will be the year that large enterprises scale their SOA initiatives up — if not generally to enterprise-wide implementations, then at least to substantial cross-departmental projects,” said ZapThink LLC senior analyst Jason Bloomberg in an e-mail to SearchWebServices.com. “So we’re no longer talking about SOA adoption — we’re talking about scaling SOA now.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Service-oriented hype to meet hard realities

“The issue is that architecture is a best practice,” says Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. “The tool set will get you only part of the way. Architecture is a discipline; you don’t get it from a tool. You need to know what services to build, how to build them at the right level of granularity and how to build them loosely coupled.”

“There is still some shakin’ going on,” Schmelzer says about the development of key specifications such as business process, management and reliability. But he notes that the core Web services specifications such as XML, SOAP and WSDL are “pretty mature.”

“Companies should be aware of where the specs are at, but by and large, individual companies don’t implement the spec directly anyway. They look for products,” Schmelzer says. “So companies need to put pressure on the vendors to collaborate and get these specs out.”

Read more at: NetworkWorld