Accenture: SOA as Strategic Architecture for Improving Business Performance

Professional services firm Accenture’s core mission is to improve the business performance of its clients. Accenture accomplishes this mission through a combination of business process expertise and technical consulting. Accenture’s technology roadmap offers their clients an approach to building information technology solutions and approaches that will meet the goal of business performance improvement.

Accenture believes that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) will underpin this technology roadmap. They believe SOA will be the single dominant technical architecture in the future, driven primarily by the need for interoperability. As a result, they are recommending and implementing SOA-based approaches for improving the business of clients worldwide.

Waning EAI Market Turns to Project-Based Integration

Conversely, one research firm believes service-oriented processes may some day sound the death knell for EAI. ZapThink published their results in a study this past April.

“If you’re thinking of it from the bottom-up as a bunch of systems that you’re trying to integrate, you’re going to need a bunch of expensive systems to make it happen,” said ZapThink Senior Analyst Ron Schmelzer. “By approaching a Service-Oriented Architecture from a business process perspective, it will buy you all of the things people are trying to solve with integration products today.”

Read more at: Internetnews.com

Web services ID management touted

“SPML adds to the identity management capabilities by providing a standard way in which access to these critical infrastructure resources can be granted or denied,” said analyst Ronald Schmelzer of ZapThink in Waltham, Mass. “This means that companies can build applications that have strict identity and security policies without having to do so in a proprietary and noninteroperable manner.”

“While SPML has more to do with provisioning physical access to specific resources, there is definitely potential for overlap or at least complementary offering to the WS-Security and WS-Policy specifications,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Strategies for Achieving Real-Time Enterprise Application Integration

The vision of many enterprise integration vendors is to be the standard service-oriented integration platform provider for the enterprise. In fact, it is a large opportunity for many of these vendors to extend their leadership in the integration market. A recent ZapThink survey indicates that the market opportunity will be about $6.2 billion by 2006.

Read more at: Web Services Journal

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.

ZapNote: Sybase

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Expanding The Potential of Filemaker With XML

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is everywhere. It provides a standardized, versatile, and cross-platform way of describing and structuring data. With nearly 8.5 million units shipped worldwide, FileMaker is the leading workgroup database software for quickly creating and sharing business solutions. XML further extends the reach of FileMaker Pro 6. With the XML support in FileMaker Pro 6, developers and power users can create solutions that connect workgroups and other users with a virtually limitless number of other applications. Building upon earlier support of XML, the new FileMaker Pro 6 has integrated XML import/export in the application, to become even better connected to enterprise applications, systems, and business processes.

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.

ZapNote: IONA

The idea of Service-Oriented Integration (SOI) quite simple: rather than requiring systems to understand the details of a system in order to extract information, we can merely expose that system as a service and make queries to the service to meet our needs. SOI is merging different integration paradigms into a single solution set: integration between devices (from handhelds to mainframes), applications (such as Great Plains, SAP, and Siebel), B2B integration, and traditional EAI. IONA has released a platform known as the Orbix End-to-Anywhere (E2A) Web Services Integration Platform that sets the context for a very wide set of products covering the widest range of functionality in an SOI environment.