Service-Oriented Architecture Consulting Partnership Landscape

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) represent an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that promises a flexible IT environment that leads to business agility. As companies look to leverage the business advantages of Web Services to address strategic business needs, they are increasingly looking to build SOAs. However, SOAs require special skills and expertise. When companies do not have such skills in-house, they turn to consultants, system integrators, and other professional services organizations.

The movement to SOAs present both opportunities and threats to consulting firms: on the one hand, there will be an increased demand for architectural consulting, business process consulting and the implementation tasks associated with building SOAs. On the other hand, as SOAs take hold and Service-oriented process solutions supplant integration solutions, the market for system integration will dry up, requiring system integrators to change their business focus.

This report analyzes the market for SO

Startups Pushing The Idea Of Web-Services Hubs

“Companies will begin to accept service-oriented architectures this year, and it will become the dominant distributed computing approach in 2006,” predicts Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink, an XML and Web services-research group. A class of software that barely registers on the applause meter today may prove to be a $10 billion market by 2005, he says.

Read more at: InformationWeek

Overview of Web Services Security

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Overview of Web Services Management

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Service-Oriented Process

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Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.

Managing Web services

The dilemma, according to Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, a Waltham, Mass.-based analyst firm specializing in XML and Web services, is that all the problems occur outside of the applications from which they were spawned.

“My system may be working and so is yours, but the service still might not work,” he said. Such headaches may sound familiar to veterans of electronic data interchange (EDI) systems, which required intricate handshakes arranged in advance. But with Web services, the trick is that all handshakes are supposed to occur on the fly.

Read more at: Application Development Trends

Blue Titan Vies For Niche In Web Services Management

Blue Titan is far from the only ISV trying to tackle Web services management ahead of the demand for the technology. Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with Waltham, Mass.-based research firm ZapThink, estimates there are at least 10 startups focused on some aspect of Web services management.

Read more at: CRN

SOA Tools and Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best practices as well as an analysis of the tools that are currently available for building Service-oriented architectures.

SOA Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best pra