OASIS Develops SOA Adoption Blueprints

“There is a shortage of clear, demonstrable examples of working SOA implementations that teams can use to jumpstart new projects,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst, ZapThink LLC. “By defining an archetypal set of business requirements and functions that SOA best practices can address, the adoption blueprints will encourage the production of useful implementation examples and lower the risk of SOA initiatives overall.”

Read more at: eBizQ

The next step for meta data: Application integration

A meta data repository can help with integration in two primary ways, said Ron Schmelzer, founder and senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass. “It can help you access data you may not be aware of — loosely coupling the application source with the consumer — and it can help smooth differences between the information sources themselves.”

In addition, there is a shift going on in how people are approaching integration projects in general, said ZapThink’s Schmelzer. “Optimally, you don’t want to move information from one place to another and keep replicating it — like you do with the older extract-transform-load approaches.” The newer method, with much less impact on network traffic and system resources in general, is to “leave the information where it’s at” and create meta data and hooks to allow applications to use it right where it already exists, he noted.

While UDDI registries certainly can and do handle meta data, they are pretty much the “ugly ducklings” of the Web services world, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. “UDDI as a standard isn’t really complete, so you wouldn’t go and buy yourself one. They always do other stuff, like LDAP or other things.”

Read more at: Application Development Trends

Service Orientation Market Trends

While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.

In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.

These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.

Raining Data Headlines Panel of Experts to Discuss the Nuts and Bolts of Service-Oriented Architectures, Named ZapThought Leader

WHAT: Raining Data, recognized by ZapThink LLC as a ZapThought
Leader for its innovative mid-tier TigerLogic XML data
management server that aggregates data of any type and from
any source, will be on a panel of experts to discuss ‘The Nuts
and Bolts of Service-Oriented Architectures’ in a session at
this year’s ZapThinkTank Conference. The conference is
organized by ZapThink, a leading XML technology analysis firm.

WHO: Boris Geller, Vice President of Market Development for Raining
Data Corporation, joined by a panel of experts.

WHY: Security, data management, integration, and process automation
are four key technology categories that enable
Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). But designing SOAs can
be a complex task, and there is no single proven way to
implement them. The mixture of technologies to be considered
during the design process, particularly when it comes to
high-speed data management and accessibility, can overwhelm
even the most ambitious IT managers. ZapThink LLC has
identified Raining Data as a ZapThought Leader for its
commitment to provide a more agile, scaleable and cost-
effective data architecture to implement XML, Web Services and
SOAs. In support of the ZapThought Lead program, Raining Data
will sit on panel to discuss design and best practices for
achieving success in cost effective deployments.

Read more at: Raining Data Press Release

Raining Data Launches Packaged Support for Financial Services XML Standards

“Financial Services Providers are essentially information-based
businesses: their primary asset is the information they store and share,”
said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC. “FSPs are struggling
today with finding the most agile and cost-effective means to integrate and
aggregate information from a wide range of unstructured and semi-structured
enterprise data sources. Today’s integration solutions are either targeted at
structured sources of information such as databases, or are too rigid and
expensive to handle enterprise information aggregation needs. A single
integration architecture or approach is not sufficient to guarantee
interoperability among businesses and systems. In order to facilitate
interoperability, Financial Services XML standards are needed to guarantee
inter-organizational information exchange, enabling trading desk and customer
care professionals to have the timely, relevant intelligence they require.”

Read more at: Raining Data Press Release

Raining Data Corporation to Demonstrate Mid-Tier XML Data Server For Rapid Information Aggregation at SIA 2003

Raining Data will be providing attendees of the SIA 2003 Technology
Management Conference free copies of recently published research reports that
detail the TigerLogic XDMS approach and its importance to strategic
information management architecture in the financial services industry,
including:

— “High Performance Information Aggregation Using XML-Based Operational
Data Servers: Empowering Flexible Data Aggregation in the Financial
Services Markets,” by Ronald Schmelzer, Senior Analyst at ZapThink,
LLC, May 2003, also available at
http://www.rainingdata.com/zapthink/index.html

Read more at: Silicon Valley biz ink

High-Performance Information Aggregation Using XML-Based Operational Data Servers

Financial Service Providers are essentially information-based businesses: their primary asset is the information they store and share. These companies are struggling today with finding the most flexible and cost-effective means to integrate and aggregate information from a wide range of unstructured and semi-structured enterprise data sources. Today’s integration solutions are either targeted only at structured sources of information such as databases, or are too rigid and expensive to handle enterprise information integration and aggregation needs. Furthermore, the unique requirements of Financial Services firms for real-time, scalable access to disparate information has not been successfully met by today’s vendors.

This paper presents a solution in the form of a mid-tier information aggregation server that provides an XML-based operational data store as a way of providing aggregated access to multiple data sources. Raining Data’s TigerLogic XDMS is used as a strong example of an XML operational data server that provides a way to store and aggregate semi-structured and structured data from a wide variety of sources, XML-enables access to aggregated information and does not require the user to know the structure of data in advance or make any modifications, mapping, or transformations to those data.

Targeted at line-of-business users, corporate architects, as well as IT managers at Financial Services firms, this paper helps readers find a better way to integrate and aggregate disparate systems in the enterprise while lowering costs and off-loading performance from back-end operational servers. Readers will gain a critical understanding of how XML operational data stores can be used in the mid-tier to aggregate data from the heterogeneous sources in the Financial Services enterprise.

ZapNote: Xaware

Efforts to "XML enable" the enterprise will be slowed by efforts to extract and manipulate these data sources. In addition, there has been a long sought-after goal of aggregating data from disparate data sources and providing a single interface for querying and retrieval of results. XAware applies an XML front-end to legacy data and thus abstracts interface and application integration requirements with end sources of data.