SOA Case Studies

This is a 21 slide presentaiton that outlines some of the key Case Studies in making SOA work. Specfifically, Verizon, DFAS, Aeroplan, Merrill Lynch, The Hartford, and some conclusions are covered.

Case Study: Merrill Lynch

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SOA Best Practices

Research group ZapThink, a boutique firm specializing in XML and Web services issues, has released a list entitled, “Ten Emerging Best Practices For Building SOAs.”

ZapThink’s recommendations (penned by analyst Jason Bloomberg), include the following: create top-down guidelines and strategy for deployment, create a platform-agnostic model, upgrade on an ongoing basis, make the services as simple to consume as possible, avoid vendor lock-in and take advantage of interoperability to work with a mix of providers, and expose as much legacy data and functionality as possible as Web services.

Read more at: Line56

Sun Says Java Will Support Key Web Services Standards

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., said the decision to support WS-I’s basic profile shows that Sun is serious about its activity in the organization.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

Security key goal for Web services group

“Once the WS-I starts diving into the meat of things, like security, messaging, reliability and transactions, the question becomes whether it will get the support of vendors–and will they have the compliance schemes,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink. “That remains to be seen. And in order for it to work, it can’t be a political process.”

Read more at: CNet (also in BusinessWeek and ZDNet)

Recruiting WS-I Members from Vertical Industries

You joined the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization to accelerate and encourage the adoption of Web services. WS-I plans to meet these goals by providing deliverables that assist in the interoperability of Web services implementations. For the WS-I to be successful in its mission, however, it is essential that it has broad industry representation within its membership. WS-I needs your help.

At this time, a vast majority of WS-I members are IT vendors. Whether you work for a vendor or not, it’s in your company’s best interest to expand the WS-I membership, expecially among industry members outside the IT community. This white paper is an important tool to help you in this important activity.

This paper seeks to explain why current WS-I members should recruit additional industry members, why industry members should join the WS-I, and what actions WS-I members should take to recruit new members. It should be a starting point for ideas about how you can help the WS-I grow and become more effective in achieving its goals.

“Speech Web Apps Gain Boost from VoiceXML”

The back end is built just like any other server-side application, using Perl, CGI, Java Server Pages (JSP), or Active Server Pages (ASP). “Just as HTML specifies how a Web page is displayed but doesn’t specify a particular browser or server, VoiceXML lets you build voice-driven systems without knowing what’s on the front and back ends,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink.

Read more at: XML and Web Services Magazine

“Following the Money”

Banks, brokerage houses, and insurance and real estate companies spent $500 million on XML-related technologies last year and will invest an estimated $8.4 billion a year by 2005, more than any other industry, according to a recent XML market research report, “XML in Financial Services,” by Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC, a market research company in Waltham, Mass.

Read more at: eWeek

ZapNote: Tamesis

Financial traders depend on information feeds from many different systems and consolidate these feeds into a single view that hopefully gives them the information they need to make educated decisions. What is needed is a real-time, accurate, integrated, and efficient system for aggregating information from multiple sources. Tamesis is focusing squarely on this problem by providing an XML and Web Services-enabled product that aims to be a real-time, accurate, and highly integrated solution. The company has built a product called Tamesis Risk Informer that aims to extract data from different data sources, normalize to an XML format and present aggregated information in a customizable view to end trader users.