SOA vendors link up for interoperability

SOA Link and other recent developments are evidence that SOA is moving beyond the “hype” stage, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at Zapthink, which sells research to SOA firms.

“SOA’s not hype. SOA and Web services are moving beyond the ‘connect things together’ stage. We’re at a point where it’s becoming a part of the mainstream,” Schmelzer said.

“That’s a bit less sexy, because you’re getting down to brass tacks: implementation details, not the big news stories,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

SOA Vendors Link For Interoperability

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer, whose research firm covers distributed computing, said it’s not particularly surprising that software powers are not there.

He said larger platform vendors will always push the fact that interoperability starts and ends with their platform primarily, and then secondarily to other products, while members of SOA Link know that other products, platforms, and infrastructure have to play in order for the group to prosper.

“This means that any SOA Link-implementing vendor acknowledges that they will interoperate with all other SOA Link vendors, including platform competitors,” Schmelzer said.

“It would be harder for the platform vendors to get a win by making such a claim. However, if customers start demanding this sort of vendor-neutral interoperability, then yes, at some point, these bigger fish will have to join the party.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Forum Systems Outlines Key Criteria for SOA Success

“One of the side effects of the movement to SOA is the formerly separate worlds of network administration and application development which are becoming increasingly intertwined,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. “A datacenter built for SOA must define how hardware assets as well as software services are secured, controlled and accessed. Companies like Forum Systems have been entrenched with SOA implementations and their field experience is of value to organizations looking to make intelligent datacenter decisions.”

Read more at: GRIDToday

Forum Systems Outlines Infrastructure Decision Criteria for State-of-the-Art Service-Oriented Architecture Data Centers

“One of the side effects of the movement to SOA is the formerly separate worlds of network administration and application development which are becoming increasingly intertwined,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. “A datacenter built for SOA must define how hardware assets as well as software services are secured, controlled and accessed. Companies like Forum Systems have been entrenched with SOA implementations and their field experience is of value to organizations looking to make intelligent datacenter decisions.”

Read more at: Forum Systems Press Release

SOA management players partner up

“The market is maturing pretty significantly and vendors are trying to capitalize on this by bringing together a complete solution,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “SOA is architecture. You need a lot of different things. Going to 12 different vendors to get those things is increasingly looking tenuous. The market is pushing toward consolidation and deeper partnerships.”

While Actional’s play is now as part of a larger company, competitor SOA Software has been bulking up, most recently with a mainframe Web services product acquired from Merrill Lynch. “SOA Software is building a suite,” Schmelzer said. “They’ve moving well beyond management.” And making itself “registry independent” even though the company has its own registry product is smart, he said, “because the market hasn’t decided its buying behavior yet.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

SOA Vendors Ready New Wares

Revamped software from Software AG, Sonic and other vendors shows the market for more mature SOA products is growing, says Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink. “We’re now at the point where the vendors have consolidated to a certain degree, the different markets have coalesced, and the standards are relatively mature, so the products are becoming more mature.”

Among users, SOA is seen as a less risky technology than it was in the past, he adds. Companies are looking beyond simply applying services interfaces to systems and thinking about how to build proper services atop a wellconceived runtime infrastructure. “We’re seeing a lot more companies really starting to take a look at planning — planning which services to build and how to build them in a secured, governed, reliable way.”

Read more at: NetworkWorld

CA set to tackle Web services security

With companies beginning to bring Web services online, customers are looking for tools that can help them thwart potential attacks and ensure that the Web services are used only by authorized users and applications, says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst with ZapThink.

“The Unicenter WSDM product is a reasonably mature product for Web-services management, and Transaction Minder was gaining some traction in the Web-services security space at the time that CA acquired Netegrity,” Bloomberg says. “These are the two leading SOA products that CA offers, so it makes sense for them to be together.”

Read more at: NetworkWorld

RSA: CA’s ‘Project SOA’ tackles Web services security

With companies now beginning to bring Web services online, customers are looking for tools that can help them thwart potential attacks and also ensure that the Web services are used by only authorized users and applications, said Jason Bloomberg a senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, based in Baltimore.

“The Unicenter WSDM product is a reasonably mature product for Web services management, and Transaction Minder was gaining some traction in the Web services security space at the time that CA acquired Netegrity,” Bloomberg said. “These are the two leading SOA products that CA offers, so it makes sense for them to be together.”

Read more at: ComputerWorld

Forum Systems Issues AJAX Alert

“By acknowledging the exposure of AJAX applications, developers and administrators will be well-prepared to handle even accidental events that may disrupt business,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink, in Waltham, Mass., in a statement.

Read more at: eWeek

Forum Systems Fills Security Hole

The deal makes sense on a number of levels, said ZapThink Research analyst Jason Bloomberg.

“Kenai’s policy definition is like peanut butter to Forum’s policy enforcement chocolate,” Bloomberg said. “Also, they shared investors, so the synergies made sense to them as a single company.”

Forum and Kenai also share a common interest in growing their respective businesses in a market that consolidates with each passing month. ZapThink predicted 2006 would be a year of mass consolidation in the burgeoning market for distributed computing systems such as SOAs

Read more at: InternetNews