Now think about how organizations are starting to rely on Cloud-based services, such as Amazon S3 (storage) and Force.com (sales force automation). These services are not on-premises SOA service, so they are not in the SOA registry/repository. But the organization relies on these servi...

At its long-running "SOA World Conference & Expo" event, held twice a year ever since the year 2000, SYS-CON Events prides itself on inviting knowledgeable and articulate industry executives to participate in its Power Panels - simulcast at every show direct from the keynote hall. In t...

Next in the complexity chain are distributed systems. In a distributed system, there are multiple databases and multiple applications. In order to maintain data integrity in a distributed system, transactions across multiple data sources need to be handled correctly in a fail-safe mann...

Potentially massive savings can be had from thwarting legal discovery fulfillment problems in advance by governing and managing information. In a sponsored podcast, I recently examined how the well-managed -- versus the haphazard -- information oversight approach reduces legal risks. Y...

For all the buzz about cloud computing, there remains a key challenge for companies: regulatory compliance and governance issues. Left unaddressed, these issues could derail the long-term growth of cloud adoption. That's why more companies are coming to market with ever-evolving sol...

ZapThink today announces the availability of a series of SOA training and certification courses in Johannesburg, South Africa, run in conjunction with realIRM. ZapThink will run its four-day Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) Boot Camp, providing in-depth, hands-on training and certific...

As we predicted earlier in the year, cloud computing is starting to take hold, especially if you believe the marketing literature of vendors and consulting firms. Yet, we are seeing an increasing number of Cloud success stories, ranging from simplistic consumption of utility Services a...

I'm currently reading “Influencers”, in which the authors make a great point that with innovation, the messenger is as important as the message. There’s a story of a researcher who attempts to get farmers to use a more disease resistant strain of corn, but the farmers don’t view this p...

I was discussing the recent Malcom Gladwell basketball piece with a friend of mine. In this recent piece, published in the New Yorker, the writer and a guy he interviewed draw a parallel between basketball strategy and the biblical tale of David and Goliath. My friend told me that he's...

The use of APIs pervades the emerging world of cloud computing. People find they can mix and match information from all sorts of sources to create an application that specifically meets their needs. Indeed, companies such as The Web Service are in the business of providing you with k...

After years of being admonished to focus on the business first, most IT execs still can't stop talking about the speeds/feeds, bugs/features, and bullet point aspects of their latest technology. They have to stop doing this.

One of the fundamental goals when designing service-oriented solutions is to attain a reduced degree of coupling between services, thereby increasing the freedom and flexibility with which services can be individually evolved. Achieving the right level of coupling “looseness” is most o...

If you've been following me on Twitter, or through my other blogs, you already know that I made it to the SOA World Conference & Expo in San Jose, CA, which was collocated with Cloud Computing Conference & Expo. I did the keynote on Wednesday and then stayed around for some of the sess...

Services have a lot of potential for providing value to the enterprise, but their use also brings a level of risk. Some of these risks are financial, while others are operational. Fortunately, all of this risk can be satisfactorily mitigated through appropriate governance activities. S...

Over the past several years, there has been much fanfare regarding the promise of SOA. However, as with any IT-related solution, it is not a magic bullet or cure-all for IT integration. In fact, SOA does not solve business process problems, but rather identifies both the good and bad o...

While the number of SaaS providers grows, as well as enterprise acceptance, we are really not breaking new ground. In essence, today's SaaS providers offer visual systems, meaning they communicate with a human being. They also provide a single visual interface, and the users have to ta...

AgilePath announced a series of new SOA Playbook Acceleration Solutions. AgilePath's SOA Acceleration Solutions are a suite of integrated offerings that include targeted SOA training, SOA workshops, and SOA XPE 'sprints' focused on delivering rapid results for key SOA focus areas, all ...

The technologies used by IT to create SOAs are maturing. They are found to be robust and reliable. SOA governance provides a framework for making and applying the decisions that determine how the SOA will be designed, developed and operated. Work with real enterprises deploying SOAs to...

SOA has become a strategic imperative for organizations today. Without a SOA strategy, you risk being outpaced and outperformed by competitors who are better equipped to serve customers, seize opportunities and respond to change. This paper highlights the concept of SOA governance and ...

Vordel unveiled version 5.1 of its XML network infrastructure products, to accelerate, manage and protect XML applications. Vordel 5.1 addresses the need for lifecycle management of policy across the SOA. By combining the central management of SOA policies with distributed enforcement ...

Software AG announced that Koç Allianz has selected CentraSite from Software AG to support the company's process reengineering efforts. Established as a partnership between the Koç Group and Allianz, Koç Allianz is one of the largest insurers in Turkey with nearly one million customers...

As the field of service-oriented architecture (SOA) evolves, it brings interesting challenges that should be addressed in order to drive its adoption and realize the benefits it has been promising. It took a while for many to understand that SOA is not purely a technology issue.

WSO2 announced that it has extended its support for service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance through enhanced authentication. Version 1.5 of the WSO2 Identity Solution for strong Web authentication based on open standards and open source is now generally available and adds suppor...

AmberPoint announced that it has joined the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, where it will work with SAP to provide best practices for integrating its service-oriented architecture (SOA) runtime governance solutions with SAP enterprise services. AmberPoint intends to work with the SAP Co-Innovat...

A new global survey issued by Software AG suggests that enterprise adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has 'crossed the chasm'. Users also identified SOA governance as a key component of sustainable implementations with holistic, lifecycle approaches viewed as a core requir...

Software AG and the Potsdam-based Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering (HPI) announced the successful completion of a one-year research project examining the impact of service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance on Green IT practices. Working together, the two o...

MuleSource announced general availability of Mule Galaxy Enterprise, a new production-ready solution for storing and managing SOA artifacts offering new enterprise-class features such as clustering for high availability, an extensible query engine, and more. Mule Galaxy Enterprise, the...

WSO2 announced the availability of the open source WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Version 1.7 to support enterprises' heterogeneous, high-volume service-oriented architecture (SOA) demands. The WSO2 ESB 1.7 offers enhancements to stability, scalability and availability - resulting ...

If governance were a house, you would be left with the options of either building it from the ground-up or attempting to haul a complete house in on a large truck. While the latter is possible, it is fraught with difficulty. The house does not lend itself well to transport. It may beco...

Melding a stable enterprise architecture with the right level of technical and organization transparency involves two different perspectives. An architect can lay a SOA foundation that enables development teams to build new functionality leveraging Web Services. However, without a libr...

Layer 7 Technologies announced it has joined the HP Internet Software Vendor (ISV) Marketplace Referral Program to facilitate the companies' collaboration in the field and accelerate the adoption of joint solutions.

SOA Software and iTKO announced a combined solution for continuous management and quality assurance across the entire design, development and change lifecycle of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) applications. The integrated offering includes iTKO's LISA Testing, Validation and Virtu...

Layer 7 Technologies announced a collaboration with Sun Microsystems to help secure and govern Web services built using the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). Sun customers will be able to purchase Layer 7 products globally through Sun Professional Services.

Managing Web Services in production is no easy task. Ensuring that services follow corporate security and SOA governance requirements, monitoring compliance with individual SLAs, preventing one client from degrading the performance of others and ensuring services built today will work ...

AgilePath announced its CEO, Eric Marks, has completed his 3rd SOA book focused on SOA governance. The new book is entitled 'SOA Governance: Evolving Governance in the Services-Driven Enterprise,' published by John Wiley & Sons, and is slated for release in August 2008. In addition, Ag...

AmberPoint announced that it has extended the reach of its runtime SOA governance software to include enterprise applications from software vendors and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers. SOA-based systems are heterogeneous composite applications that often include packaged applica...

SOA Software announced the availability of Repository Manager 6.0 (previously Logidex). Repository Manager 6.0 enables enterprises to understand what services and other software assets exist, where they're located and how each fits into a company's business and technical landscape. By ...

Layer 7 Technologies announced its go-to-market partnership with Steria Benelux. Steria will act as a channel partner for Layer 7's SOA gateway products in Belgium to offer leading SOA security, governance solutions and support to its current and prospective customers.

Adopting SOA is a lot like gardening. It takes time, skill, a lot of hard work, and the process can be messy and even a bit frustrating at times. I know you've probably heard tons of different analogies that attempt to put SOA and governance into everyday terms and I'm sure that growin...

Not all services are created equal. It would be great if implementing SOA were simply a matter of applying a standard design pattern to all services. Once IT had identified and codified an optimal design standard, services could be stamped out in assembly-line fashion until the IT land...