SOA vendor Wakesoft to shut down Monday

One analyst said the pace of such closures is only likely to quicken as the big software players continue to enrich their product lines with technologies and products for building a service-oriented architecture, the latest trend in the software industry.

“As major vendors realize how real the SOA trend is, and how critical it is to solving some of the long standing issues around business integration, they are seeking to consolidate the market in order to offer complete solutions to their customers,” said Ron Schmelzer, a principal analyst with ZapThink LLC.

“We expect many of the different SOA-related markets to consolidate through acquisition, merger, or failure of many of the emerging startups and incumbent vendors in the space,” he said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

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.

Wakesoft answers SOA call

The primary advantage to the enterprise of a so-called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is its ability to enable development of agile business processes and IT systems that are flexible enough to respond quickly to change. At least that’s the conclusion of ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg.

In his recently published report “Service-Oriented Architecture Tools & Best Practices: Beyond Point-to-Point Web Services,” Bloomberg contends that “Reworking existing brittle, high-cost IT infrastructures into flexible, Service-oriented architectures promises substantial long-term cost savings and revenue opportunities through increased business agility.”

Read more at: Application Development Trends

Following An Architecture For Web Services

Even if not geared initially as a Web service, the structure of the applications makes it easier to add the Web services later. The platform “enables project teams to deliver systems ready for a services-oriented-architecture in phases,” says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, an XML and Web-services analyst firm. An application could first be given connectivity to HTTP, then at a later date get the benefit of having its output parsed into XML to keep in step with user requirements, he notes.

Read more at: InternetWeek

Wakesoft enables services-oriented architecture

“Wakesoft is one of the few companies that is focused on building a tool that supports a services-oriented architecture (SOA) out of the box,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink.

“[Wakesoft's platform] provides the development environment as well as management and other capabilities that are needed to build an SOA,” Bloomberg said.

But Wakesoft will face a challenge in that it has to provide the correct adapters, management services and development tools, said Bloomberg.

Read more at: CW360

Wakesoft enables services-oriented architectures

An analyst described Wakesoft’s offering as an architecture server on top of a middleware architecture. “Wakesoft is one of the few companies that is focused on building a tool that supports a services-oriented architecture [SOA] out of the box,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, in Waltham, Mass.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Wakesoft Launches New Architecture Platform for Delivering Services-Oriented Systems Today

“While Service Oriented Architecture initiatives are beginning to take hold in enterprises today, project teams still have to meet short-term delivery requirements,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. “The Wakesoft Architecture Platform provides a structure that enables project teams to deliver SOA-ready systems in phases, delivering positive ROI at every step — a key differentiator in this market.”

Read more at: Wakesoft Press Release

Wakesoft Upgrades Architecture Platform

“While Service Oriented Architecture initiatives are beginning to take hold in enterprises today, project teams still have to meet short-term delivery requirements,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. “The Wakesoft Architecture Platform provides a structure that enables project teams to deliver SOA-ready systems in phases, delivering positive ROI at every step – a key differentiator in this market.”

Read more at: eBizQ.net

Services Everywhere — Business vs. Technology Services

While I was thinking about this topic, I read an article in Application Development Trends by Jason Bloomberg, titled “Principles of SOA” (where SOA is service-oriented architecture). The services that comprise the SOA that Bloomberg describes are business services. In the article he introduces an SOA Meta-Model and a five-view approach to SOA, which are helpful to distinguish business services and technology services.

Read more at: Wakesoft Newsletter

SOA Tools

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