What problems can SOA appliances solve? What is "service mediation"? Where is the market going, with new trends like virtualization, cloud computing, and new security paradigms?

During the last several years, SOA hardware appliances have emerged as a popular way to deliver XML acceleration and web service gateway security. However, recent data center virtualization, multi-core optimization, and application portfolio reorganization trends are forcing a shift to the flexibility of software appliances. In addition, appliance feature improvements are enabling a leap forward into a broader range of usage models.

"Virtualizing hardware appliances is pretty tough, it's pretty much impossible," says Intel’s Blake Dournaee in this informative and forward-looking webinar currently screening on SYS-CON.TV.

Co-presenting with Oracle’s Vikas Jain, the webinar discusses three game-changing innovations. So if you want to learn about new B2B security threats like "XML bombs" - and about what's different about Cloud Computing when it comes to service mediation - make sure to view this video today.

Click Here to View "The Evolving SOA Appliance" Webinar

Dournaee is a domain expert on XML Security, on which he has authored a popular book. He also co-authored SOA Demystified from Intel Press. At Intel his role is Product Manager of the SOA Products Group.

Myself, I particularly enjoy the part in this presentation where he gets onto the topic of some of the new threats from XML/SOA, especially the part about the threat model for SOA/XML/RIA/Mash-ups. (That's where the reference to "XML bombs" occurs by the way.)

Click Here to View "The Evolving SOA Appliance" Webinar

Dournaee is also something of a historian of technology, and cannot resist pausing for one slide to contemplate "Moore's Law for SOA" - worth seeing if you're not familiar with it already.

Vikas Jain - Product Manager of the Fusion Middleware Security Group at Oracle - follows Dournaee to give a demo that shows in practice a lot of what the webinar talks about.

Take a look right now at this video if you want to bring yourself up to date on Usage Models such as the Security Gateway for Authentication, Authorization and XML/SOA Security, Governance of SOA and Application mash-ups, Real-time integration. Or if you want to hear what Dournaee has to say on Deployment Topology, both in the DMZ and behind the DMZ.

It's a great place too to learn about End2End Identity Propagation using Intel's appliance and Oracle WSM agents, which is why the demo at the end is important.