 Careers
Oracle Integration SOA Software’s Service Manager™ integrates with Oracle’s BPEL Business Process Manager and related products. With Oracle exposing and consuming Web services as part of their next-generation of eBusiness Suite, version 11.5.10, the Service Manager provides Oracle customers with the ability to implement Web services with end-to-end security, location transparency, SLAs, and quality of service. With the Service Manager, Oracle’s process tools can now enable the benefits of an SOA by abstracting all the complexity of consuming Web services away from the process tools, bringing true agility for the first time to a loosely coupled heterogeneous environment.
Integration with Oracle eBusiness Suite 11.5.10
Integration with Oracle BPEL Process Manager
Enterprise Architect Summit 2008 If you have responsibility for managing IT infrastructures, designing and implementing enterprise architectures, or implementing strategic software or systems, come to the Enterprise Architect Summit this October. Here you will hear talks from top industry experts on enterprise architecture methodologies, service-oriented architecture implementations, and innovative new techniques for building systems that last. You’ll have many networking opportunities with peers from other organizations, enabling you to share ideas and hear firsthand about what approaches worked and why. You’ll take away expert analyses, a dynamic network of enterprise architecture peers, and new concepts ready to implement.
SOA Software Expands European Operations Los Angeles, Calif. – September 29, 2008 – SOA Software, the leading Integrated SOA Governance vendor announced today that it has hired Wolf Gilbert; an executive from Microsoft Corporation to lead its rapid expansion into the European market. Mr. Gilbert, joining SOA Software as Vice President for European Operations, combines strong business credentials with a deep technology background. He holds an MBA from Southern Methodist University. Mr. Gilbert designed and built one of the first ever Java-based ORB’s and spent most of the last decade as an Architect for Microsoft. Mr. Gilbert helped design Windows Server 2003 and had a hand in the development of SQL Server 2005. It was during this time at Microsoft that Mr. Gilbert discovered his true passion for Service Oriented Architecture and he helped cultivate this passion in others at Microsoft; Mr. Gilbert was a co-founder of Microsoft’s SOA Solutions Team and the Chief Architect behind its Managed Services Engine. SOA Software has seen extraordinary growth in the US market over the last 3 years. SOA Software sees the opportunity for accelerated growth through the European market and is bringing Mr. Gilbert on board to build European Operations and drive this growth. “We are very pleased with the way our business has grown through our strong execution in the US marketplace,” said Paul Gigg, president and CEO of SOA Software. “Customer demand in Europe is accelerating our expansion and we are excited to be able to bring on board an executive of Wolf’s caliber and background to lead this effort.” Customers use SOA Software products to accelerate their adoption of SOA. The company’s products provide a comprehensive Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution. They offer lifecycle governance, security, management and mediation of SOA, ensuring the security, reliability, performance and ease of development of service-oriented business applications. The company provides the industry’s fastest and most scalable solution for platform-independent Integrated SOA Governance Automation, the critical element enabling large customers to connect and control SOA platform components from multiple vendors. “Although European companies face some unique challenges, the underlying themes are very similar to those of their US counterparts,” said Wolf Gilbert, vice president of European operations for SOA Software. “I am confident that SOA Software has the right products to address these challenges, combined with uncommon agility and ability to execute.” SOA Software™ is the only company offering a comprehensive Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution addressing SOA security and management together with Legacy and B2B Web services requirements. SOA Software’s Repository Manager™, Policy Manager™, and Service Manager™ combine to form a comprehensive Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution, with SOLA™ providing a governable Mainframe SOA platform.
About SOA Software
SOA Software, Policy Manager, Repository Manager, Service Manager, and SOLA are trademarks of SOA Software, Inc. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their registered owners.
Compuware and SOA Software Partner for Mainframe SOA Los Angeles, Calif. – September 16, 2008-- SOA Software, the leading Integrated SOA Governance vendor, and Compuware, one of the world’s largest independent software and services companies announced today they are partnering to accelerate the adoption of mainframe SOA. This partnership will help mainframe users adopt SOA quickly and safely by leveraging the technology and expertise of two leaders in this field. Compuware brings extensive mainframe expertise to the table, with a large SOA practice focusing on enabling Systems by leveraging Service-Oriented Architecture principles. Compuware and SOA Software help companies modernize and leverage their mainframe environments by allowing business-critical mainframe applications to become first class participants in a Service-Oriented Architecture. This joint solution leverages Compuware’s centers of excellence, technology and best practices to assist clients in realizing the benefits of modernizing their extensive investments in legacy architecture. Using SOA Software’s acclaimed SOLA integration solution, Compuware assists clients by discovering, building, optimizing, testing and deploying enterprise mainframe applications as web services.
Compuware offers a set of products and a comprehensive list of professional services that can be tailored to specific business needs, for both mainframe and distributed environments.
“SOA Software is pleased to partner with Compuware, a leader in mainframe technology and integration services,” said Roberto Medrano, executive vice president of SOA Software. “The mainframe forms a critical piece of most large companies’ technology infrastructure, and we are excited about the opportunity this partnership provides to help companies leverage their mainframe systems as part of modern applications.” SOA Software’s SOLA is the most complete mainframe Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solution in the industry. SOLA solves today’s most critical problem, making mainframe applications part of a SOA in a cost effective manner. SOLA provides customers with a fast and easy process to expose mainframe applications as secure Web Services, and allows mainframe applications to consume Web Services. Using SOLA, customers can leverage billions of dollars of existing mainframe investments when building an enterprise SOA. The SOLA runtime environment runs entirely on the mainframe, eliminating the need for expensive, unreliable and unnecessary middleware. This, coupled with SOLA’s Development Studio, vastly increases developer productivity, providing faster time to market and lower application development cost. The combination of a highly optimized runtime, no middleware and improved productivity provide the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in the industry.
“Over the last 35 years Compuware has focused on delivering measurable business value to 90% of the Fortune and Global Fortune 100 companies. We are excited about bringing the SOA organization’s products as an accelerator within Compuware’s (SOA) Service Oriented Architecture strategy,” comments Vice President of Professional Services, Pat Greenwood. “Our clients look to us to leverage their existing environment for enterprise-wide application sharing, the SOLA product aligns within our go-to-market strategy in that it enables us to expose our client’s assets in an accelerated delivery model. This partnership fits within Compuware’s strategic approach of developing end-to-end enterprise solutions which leverage our clients’ investments in their mainframe environments.”
About Compuware
About SOA Software
SOA Software, Policy Manager, Repository Manager, Service Manager, and SOLA are trademarks of SOA Software, Inc. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their registered owners.
SOA Software Demonstrates Performance and Reliability in SAP® Co-Innovation Lab Las Vegas, NV – September 9, 2008 – SOA Software, the leading Integrated SOA Governance vendor, announced today that it is working in the SAP® Co-Innovation Lab, where it collaborates side-by-side with SAP to provide comprehensive Integrated SOA Governance Automation solutions for customers. SOA Software has demonstrated the exceptional performance and reliability of its SOA Governance solutions for use with SAP solutions to Fortune 1000 customers, and continues to work with the SAP Co-Innovation Lab team and customers to define and showcase advanced SOA Governance Automation use cases. Today’s announcement was made at SAP TechEd 2008 Las Vegas, where SOA Software is exhibiting in booth 83. The SAP Co-Innovation Lab is a hands-on working environment for SAP, its customers and partners to build and execute joint projects, enabling them to co-innovate new business applications and technology solutions to address specific customer needs. SOA Software is working closely with SAP at the lab to demonstrate how its products provide Integrated SOA Governance Automation capabilities in support of enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) when used with the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform. This allows customers to more confidently use SAP NetWeaver and SAP enterprise services as part of a heterogeneous enterprise SOA environment, sharing services with other commercial SOA platforms from vendors including IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Oracle, RedHat and other open source providers. “We’ve been pleased to work with SOA Software in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab,” said Scott Campbell, vice president of the Co-Innovation Labs Network at SAP. “Our customers value the opportunity to work side-by-side with SAP and SOA Software in the lab to gain strategic insights for adopting, managing and governing enterprise services – it’s the power of our ecosystem at work.” Customers benefit in the following ways from the use of SOA Software’s Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution with SAP NetWeaver in an enterprise SOA environment:
SOA Software’s platform-independent, Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution promotes the use of best practices throughout an enterprise SOA environment regardless of where services and consumers are designed, built, deployed and operated. Policy Manager, Repository Manager and Service Manager integrate with development and run-time products from most commercial platforms from vendors including SAP, Microsoft, IBM and BEA, as well as RedHat and other open source providers. “The Co-Innovation Lab provides us with the opportunity to demonstrate and validate our governance integration with SAP solutions to better meet the needs of customers,” said Frank Martinez, executive vice president at SOA Software. “Customers like Ingram Micro leverage our products so they can more confidently use SAP NetWeaver and SAP enterprise services included as a part of a heterogeneous enterprise SOA environment.”
About SOA Software
SOA Software Announces Record Growth in Production Environments Los Angeles, Calif., Sept 3, 2008—SOA Software, a leading Integrated SOA Governance Automation vendor, announced today that the number of transactions processed by its systems each month grew by 400%, to over 2.5 billion transactions a month. The growth was due to the expansion of existing production systems and the deployment into production of new SOA Governance systems. SOA Software attributes this dramatic growth in production usage to the rapid expansion of the market driving demand for SOA Governance solutions, the maturity and performance of SOA Software’s products, the SOA Governance Certification with major Platform vendors such as IBM, JBoss, Microsoft and SAP, and its ability to meet the needs of the most demanding customer environments. Using SOA Software’s products, enterprises can align people, processes and technology to deliver a successful SOA program. SOA Software’s products reduce the cost and risk in an enterprise SOA program, helping customers build the right services, build services the right way, and run services the right way by providing a platform-independent Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution. SOA Software’s products offer exceptionally low-latency, coupled with the ability to scale nearly limitlessly, while ensuring the availability and security of enterprise services. In a further strengthening of SOA Software’s market position, the company has certified IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and RedHat JBoss through its Governed Service Platform Certification Program providing customers and integrators with the confidence to use these platforms as part of a heterogeneous enterprise SOA environment. Our Governed Service Platform Certification program gives companies the confidence to implement SOA solutions at scale in mission critical production environments,” said Paul Gigg, president and chief executive officer of SOA Software. “SOA Software continues to set the pace for deployed SOA Governance production systems.” About SOA Software The world’s largest companies including Merrill Lynch, Verizon, and Pfizer use SOA Software to quickly and confidently realize the value of SOA. SOA Software’s platform-independent Integrated SOA Governance and Mainframe SOA products process over 2.5 billion mission critical transactions per month, ensuring the relevance, security, reliability, and performance of services and applications. For more information, please visit http://www.soa.com.
SOA Software, Policy Manager, Repository Manager, Service Manager, and SOLA are trademarks of SOA Software, Inc. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their registered owners.
Compuware Founded in 1973, Compuware is one of the world’s largest independent service/software companies, with annual revenue exceeding $1 billion. We have more than 23,000 customers in 93 countries, and serve the world’s largest IT organizations—including 95 percent of the Fortune 100. We offer a powerful set of integrated enterprise IT solutions to accelerate the development, improve the quality and enhance the performance of business-driving applications. With offices in 60+ locations worldwide, Compuware is a global industry leader in providing business value through software and professional services that optimize productivity and reduce costs throughout the IT life cycle.
SOA Software Selected by AlwaysOn as Top Private Company For The Third Consecutive Year Los Angeles, Calif., July 21st, 2008—SOA Software, a leading Integrated SOA Governance Automation vendor today announced that for the third straight year, it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the prestigious AO Global 250 Winners. Inclusion in the AO Global 250 signifies major developments in the creation of new business opportunities in the global technology industries. SOA Software was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and other industry experts spanning the globe, based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz. SOA Software and the AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Companies will be honored at the AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford scheduled to occur on July 22-24, 2008 at Stanford University. This two-and-a-half day executive event highlights the significant economic, political and commercial trends disrupting the global technology industries and features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates and private company CEO showcases. Fifty of the top CEOs from the AO Global 250 will present their market strategies to a panel of industry experts in a “CEO Showcase.” SOA Software will be presenting on July 23, 2008. “The AO Global 250 winners have excelled in key strategic areas in the global technology markets,” said Tony Perkins, founder and CEO of AlwaysOn. “We congratulate them for their success in introducing new tools, services, and platforms that are driving the next phase of innovation and creating real value at an economically uncertain time.” The AO Global 250 was selected from over hundreds of companies, nominated by a panel of industry experts in the online technology, media, entertainment, enterprise and greentech sectors from around the world. A full list of all the AO Global 250 winners can be found on the AlwaysOn Web site at http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/27959 With the Always On recognition at the upcoming Summit, SOA Software joins a prestigious group of organizations and individuals who provide successful cutting edge products and services in the technology industry. Since 2002, SOA Software has provided its customers with products to accelerate their adoption of SOA. The company’s products provide a comprehensive Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution. They offer lifecycle governance, security, management and mediation of SOA, ensuring the security, reliability, performance and ease of development of service-oriented business applications. The company provides the industry’s fastest and most scalable solution for platform-independent Integrated SOA Governance Automation. “SOA Software is particularly proud to be recognized by AlwaysOn for three years in a row,” said Paul Gigg, President and CEO of SOA Software. “This recognition serves as a testament to our success in the marketplace. We will continue doing what we do well- being an SOA industry thought leader and providing the very best Integrated SOA Governance products and services that help companies maximize their SOA investments” About SOA Software SOA Software’s industry-leading Integrated SOA Governance Automation products provide accountability and control over enterprise SOA programs. The world’s leading organizations including Merrill Lynch, Verizon, and Pfizer rely on SOA Software’s collaborative lifecycle solutions to build the right services the right way, and to protect their investments by ensuring the performance, availability and security of services on all their distributed and mainframe platforms. For more information, please visit http://www.soa.com. SOA Software, Policy Manager, Repository Manager, Service Manager, and SOLA are trademarks of SOA Software, Inc. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their registered owners. About AlwaysOn AlwaysOn ignited the open-media revolution in early 2003 by being the first media brand to launch a community blog network. In 2004, AlwaysOn continued to lead the industry in innovation by engaging its bloggers in a social network. AlwaysOn is also revolutionizing the media business by applying its open-media principles to its executive event series (Stanford Summit, OnHollywood, OnMedia, GoingGreen, NordicGreen, and Venture Summit East and West) and quarterly print “blogozine”. No other media brand has dared to create such open interaction with its readers and event participants.
Pricing Pricing available upon request. Please contact a sales representative at . SOA Software is licensed per user and per CPU, based upon the modules required. Enterprise site pricing is available for larger customers.
Always On Global 250 Award Winner 2008 SOA Software is proud to announce a third consecutive year winning an Always On Award
Enterprise SOA and the Mainframe Solutions
What is Mainframe SOA?The terms Web Services and SOA are often used interchangeably, but the reality is that they’re quite different. Let’s begin by describing what SOA isn’t, and we’ll leave that to Joe McKendrick and Dave Linthicum:
So what is Mainframe SOA, and how can you achieve it? The answer is surprisingly simple; Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural methodology for the loose coupling and management of services. The emphasis in SOA is on the “A”. SOA uses loosely coupled, interoperable and composeable services. These services have well-defined interfaces as well as QoS attributes (or policies) on how these interfaces can be used by Service Consumers. SOA is concerned with manageability, reliability, security and change management. Collectively these terms are known as “Governance”. In order to bring SOA to a mainframe environment, companies must apply Governance to any implementation of Web Services.
Essential Components of Mainframe SOA:It’s essential that your SOA solution considers the following categories. Failure to do so can lead to an ungoverned mess, or “Just a Bunch Of Web Services”
 SOAP & XML Capability: SOAP and XML capability (commonly called “web services”) is the foundation of SOA. Many vendors only offer mainframe web services, ignoring the other components of SOA. Security: security is essential when integrating mainframe applications, especially those dealing with sensitive data. The only viable solution to Web Services security is to use WS-Security, which is the widely accepted standard for securing services. Policy Management: policy management is the heart of SOA governance. A policy can define how a service can be used, who can use it, what security is required and much, much more. Policy management based on WS-Policy standards is essential. Registry: the Holy Grail of SOA is reuse. The key to reuse is discovery of services. This is accomplished by publishing services in a Registry. A registry provides for reuse and discovery and is an essential ingredient in SOA governance. Monitoring, Logging & Audit Controls: effective Governance requires measurement, for without measurement you will be unable to judge whether your services are meeting service level agreements. Monitoring, logging and audit capability are essential building blocks of Governance. Development Tools: it is impossible to develop services without the use of a comprehensive development tool. The tool needs to be powerful and it must allow management of your SOA. It must be easy to use; there shouldn’t be a steep learning curve requiring extensive training. Finally, it should not consume enormous resources on a developer’s work station (ideally it should be “thin client”). Support for Architectural Standards: a viable SOA must be adaptable to a wide range of architectural standards, particularly yours. Features such as flexible web service development (bottom-up, top-down or meet-in-the middle), configurable dictionary, customizable access and environments, etc. are all hallmarks of an adaptable SOA. The bottom line is that your solution should fit the way you do things, not the other way around. Change and Release Management: an often overlooked aspect of service development is the “service lifecycle”. Integrated change and release management is essential to allow you to effectively manage change in your environment. Ideally your SOA solution should integrate into your existing change management procedures, and should provide you with impact analysis when a service is changed. Workflow Management: orchestration is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of service development. Some people consider that a 3270 business transaction, because it involves a conversation, requires a proprietary orchestration tool to make it work. In fact, a better approach is to use a tool that is smart enough to understand a “business use case”, and to publish that as an atomic service, without the need for proprietary orchestration to “glue together” the screen transitions. It is services themselves that need to be orchestrated, and that orchestration should be performed using industry standard techniques. The only acceptable technique for orchestration is to compose services using “Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).
SOLA - the only Mainframe SOA SolutionMore than ten years after the predicted demise of the mainframe, the platform is anything but dead. The bulk of the Fortune 1000 still run the majority of their critical systems on the mainframe, and these companies do so because the mainframe is reliable, scalable and efficient – the average mainframe application offers considerably lower TCO than an equivalent distributed application, and does so at lower risk. The challenge facing corporate IT departments today is how to leverage exiting investments in mainframe systems and applications by allowing them to be active participants in enterprise wide SOA. Most importantly, the mainframe must participate in SOA without compromising its advantages in performance, reliability or cost effectiveness. To truly leverage the mainframe, it must become a first class participant in an enterprise SOA. SOLA is the market’s most complete mainframe SOA solution. SOLA is the fastest, most reliable, most efficient and most economical mainframe SOA enablement platform. It is the only mainframe SOA product that’s used in high volume (10,000,000+ transactions per day) mission critical applications by some of the best known firms on the Fortune 500.
Build Your OwnThere are several vendors in the space that offer mainframe web services coupled with one or more components of mainframe SOA. IBM’s CICS TS v3.x also provides SOAP and XML capability upon which a solution can be built. Regardless of which option you chose, if you do not buy a complete SOA solution, you will be faced with the daunting task of integrating several components to create a viable mainframe SOA. As mainframe SOA is relatively new, not every category has a matching product.
SOLA - Fully Assembled, Governance Built InSOLA is the only product in the space that offers a complete mainframe SOA solution out of the box. SOLA provides proven, quick, efficient and cost effective application integration by publishing legacy applications as Web Services and providing every single component of a viable mainframe SOA.
Enterprise SOA is more than just a jigsaw puzzleAs important as the essential components of enterprise SOA are, they are a single dimension of a more complex issue. SOLA was designed from the ground up to address the entire spectrum of mainframe SOA issues.
Solid Foundation: building a successful mainframe SOA must start with a solid foundation. The 9 essential components of enterprise SOA make for a good beginning, but SOLA goes far beyond.
Human Assets: what good is leveraging technology assets if you ignore human assets? SOLA tasks the right people with the right jobs.
Scalability and Adaptability: a good solution should be flexible; it should be able to adapt to just about anyone’s enterprise standards, no matter how strict, and allow for unhindered growth. SOLA is standards-based and built for the enterprise. As its run time is entirely mainframe based, it inherits the mainframe’s legendary scalability and fault tolerance.
Streamlined Infrastructure: you shouldn’t have to integrate your integration. A streamlined and efficient infrastructure reduces complexity and increases reliability. It can also help lower costs due to standardization and simplified support. SOLA was designed for optimum efficiency, from its mainframe run time to its batch support and ultra efficient parser, SOLA eliminates the “plumbing” that can handicap other solutions. It is also this efficiency that helps make SOLA the fastest and most cost effective product in the space.
Development: the development tool is the interface between the tool and the people that get the job done. SOLA’s development environment is as easy to use as it is powerful. Web services can be created in minutes with no programming or training required. The development environment runs in a browser and features powerful web 2.0 capabilities such as drag and drop, tab based workspaces and dynamic indexed searches. Because it is browser based, there is no workstation software to install and older workstations can be leveraged (attention to human assets and cost effectiveness at work).
Governance: industry experts believe that governance is the single most important issue facing the fledgling SOA community. From diagnosing production outages to managing changes and meeting SLAs, governance is a non negotiable requirement in a viable SOA. A solution has to either be governable by a third party tool or incorporate strong governance capabilities. SOLA does both. With WS-Security, WS-Policy, integrated monitoring, logging and auditing, and many more built in governance features, SOLA provides a comprehensive collection of governance and lifecycle management capabilities. SOLA is also fully governable; its standards based design lends itself to simple and cost effective integration with third party governance solutions. SOLA can function as a stand-alone solution for mainframe SOA and can be governed by SOA Software’s Integrated SOA Governance Automation Solutions, Workbench and Service Manager, acting as a Certified Governed Service Platform. Certified Governed Service Platform status means that customers can be confident that their platforms won’t compromise the fidelity of the governance systems and structures defined in an enterprise SOA program. The certification process ensures that Governed Service Platforms can implement and enforce governance policies providing reporting data to enable a closed-loop audit process. The Governed Service Platform status ensures that SOLA can be consistently governed along with other enterprise service platforms.
Why can “free” be expensive?There are other tools available to help you develop your own Mainframe SOA solution. IBM’s CICS TS v3.x provides the foundation (SOAP and XML capability) for mainframe SOA built into CICS. It is very tempting to believe that you can avoid purchasing a product and work with this “free” capability to create your own mainframe SOA.
Free can be the most expensive option:
SOLA Cost SavingsSOLA is not only cost effective, it pays for itself in short order:
SOLA is proving its worth in production every day in one of the most demanding industries in the world – the financial services industry. At one customer over 200 legacy applications expose hundreds of Web Services using SOLA. Clients estimate that SOLA saved each application $0.5 to $2 million through cost avoidance and direct savings.
SOLA Performance – CPU time is moneySOLA includes a compliant non-validating parser (the SOLA DOM parser). Extensive performance tests were conducted to estimate the impact of parsing XML on a mainframe. The results were as follows:
To test the difference in performance between SOLA and CICS TS 3.2, we wrote a COBOL program containing various data types. The goal of the program was to generate a large XML response to put both products through their paces. When we attempted to import the program using CICS Web services assistant, the import failed because the program contained many unsupported data types. SOLA imported the same program without any issues. To make the comparison fair, we altered the program to remove the data types that IBM couldn’t handle, then imported the modified program using both Web services assistant and SOLA. This program was similar to the original, but lacked some functionality because of IBM’s limitations. We ran the program1000 times in both environments: IBM: 46.1 seconds for 1000 web service invocations, or 0.046 CPU seconds per call. SOLA: 7.5 seconds for 1000 web service invocations, or 0.007 CPU seconds per call. RESULT: SOLA was approximately 615% faster than CICS TS v3.2.
SOLA StabilityMillions of transactions have been processed through SOLA during extensive stability tests. No failures were experienced. SOLA has been in production for five years – no production failures have been experienced. To date, billions of transactions have been processed by SOLA.
SOLA Features and AdvantagesSOLA has several significant advantages over competitive products. Taken together these features provide lower cost and greater productivity. SOLA Features
SOLA Advantages
Furthermore, no coding is required to publish Web Services with SOLA. It is simple and easy to use with a minimal learning curve. An integrated test harness allows the developer to test and validate their Web Services with just a few mouse clicks. Finally, SOLA is proven in extensive mission critical production systems today. SOLA is already helping to achieve the pinnacle of application integration - reuse. Business functions previously isolated in legacy applications are now open for reuse by other applications in new and innovative ways. Other solutions require extensive middleware (hardware and software). Although the initial cost of these solutions appears economical the ongoing support and management is cost prohibitive.
SOLA Development EnvironmentThe SOLA Development Environment uses a J2EE compliant server and requires no workstation software to be implemented. The full features of the development environment are accessible through a browser.
SOLA COMMAREA Analyzer
SOLA 3270 Analyzer
SOLA Outbound Analyzer
The SOLA UDDI Directory
The SOLA Testing Facilities
SOLA Deployment Container
MRO
Error Logging
Monitoring
Auditing
Security
Transport Mechanism
Outbound SOAP requests
Configuration
Future ReleasesAdditional standards, such as WSDM and WS-Addressing are planned for future releases.
SOLA GovernanceSOLA is the only mainframe SOA product to offer closed-loop Governance automation. A service is automatically governed from the point of creation because it inherits a security policy. Policy, by means of WS-PolicyAttachment, is associated with the service though all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle. It is not possible to create or run an ungoverned service. On top of this, SOLA’s built in monitoring, logging and auditing capabilities, as well as its standards based architecture combine to make SOLA fully governable by external governance products like SOA’s Workbench.
Webinar - SOA GOV CON - Keys to Business-Critical: SOA Governance Recorded July 17th, 2008, 12 Noon EST
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Washington Mutual
SOA Software Update - June 2008
Software Architect Deliver world-class top-notch architecture and design for the SOA infrastructure product modules.
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Engineering Manager Be part of the Engineering division of an Indian subsidiary of a US-based successful company developing state-of the art products in the area of SOA infrastructure.
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Project Manager Be part of the Engineering division of an Indian subsidiary of a US-based successful company developing state-of the art products in the area of SOA infrastructure.
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Consumer Contract Provisioning The idea of a consumer contract for SOA closely models the idea of a business contract. It defines the terms of a relationship between a consumer, or group of consumers, and a service, or set of services. These terms should include:
The SOA Governance solution has two important roles to play in the contract process:
SOA Software’s Policy Manager provides a flexible contract negotiation workflow process that allows a potential consumer to request access to a service and negotiate SLAs, policies, and access rights. Service Manager enforces contracts to ensure that consumers without a contract cannot access a service, and monitor, manage, and report on contract terms, including SLAs, for each consumer.
For more information about SOA Software’s market-leading products, click here.
Compliance Validation One of the important roles of a governance automation solution is determining an asset’s compliance with defined enterprise policies. For example, an organization might require that a service have a design document, a description, be properly categorized, and have a defined business case before it can be promoted from the design stage to the development stage of the lifecycle. The SOA lifecycle governance automation system provides an easy way to define and manage compliance policies and associate these policies with lifecycle stages, categories, and other taxonomy or folksonomy structures and types. SOA Software’s Policy Manager provides a powerful compliance policy definition, management, and validation framework. It defines policies as sets of rules, with individual rules capable of processing a static service context in the repository, or dynamically captures message data from Service Manager. Rules are written in XQuery, Java Script, or as Java Classes. Policy Manager provides a set of policies out of the box, including WS-I Basic Profile validation, and publishes the policy language, context, and APIs to partners. Our partners have created a library of “policy packs” for various compliance definition policy sets.
For more information about SOA Software’s market-leading products, click here.
Governance Automation Enterprise architecture approvals processes for application development typically involve periodic architecture review board meetings that review proposals and designs to make decisions about whether or not to fund particular projects. In many cases these architecture review board meetings happen every 4 to 8 weeks, which is fine for large application development projects, but doesn’t scale to meet the needs of service development processes. Imagine the development process for a service which can take as little as a few days or even hours, being held up for 4-8 weeks at each stage of its lifecycle, because it needed approval at an architecture review board before proceeding. Similarly, imagine an architecture review board reviewing designs and business proposals for hundreds of services rather than the 2 or 3 applications they are used to managing. Clearly the current processes are not agile enough, and do not scale well enough, but you can’t simply remove these processes. This is where Integrated SOA Governance Automation (ISGA) solutions come in. By implementing the existing governance processes through simple, role-based workflow solutions with integrated policy compliance validation checks, ISGA solutions allow companies to maintain their current levels of control without introducing roadblocks, or causing current processes to stall. SOA Software’s Repository Manager and Policy Manager products combine to provide a comprehensive Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution. The solution provides:
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Service Lifecycle Management Services, like all other development assets and applications have their own lifecycle and as such need to be managed through their lifecycle state transitions. A Service lifecycle generally models a typical SDLC with stages including design, development, test, QA, production, and deprecation. Many organizations will add versioning into the process between production and deprecation, although in reality each new version of a service will have its own lifecycle. An SOA Governance product must be able to manage the lifecycle stage of a service and should provide a workflow-based process for migrating services between stages. Often this process will closely mirror the original publication process described above. It will include a set of policies that define criteria a service must meet before it can be migrated. It will also in many cases include manual approval steps. The lifecycle stage of a service should be used to determine who can discover the service in the registry and who can access the service at run-time. It should also define which policy set is used to determine the run-time capabilities and requirements for accessing the service. In the context of lifecycle management, the act of publishing a service to a registry so that it can be found by a broad audience of interested parties may seem like a simple enough task. In fact, this is one of the most basic, and yet most important functions of an SOA Governance solution. The essence of governance can be easily captured in the phrase “encouraging desired behavior.” This simple concept provides a backdrop to help understand what a governance solution should be focusing on, and the capabilities it should provide. Essentially it is not enough to merely provide a stick with which to beat developers and architects, we must also provide a carrot to encourage people to participate in governance processes. With this in mind, we need to think about what is the desired behavior for the participants in an SOA. For many organizations, one of the most important aspects of SOA Governance is the process of ensuring that the services that are published are appropriate. “Appropriate” in this context is another word a little like “desired.” It can mean many things, but the reality is that an “appropriate” service is a service that meets a set of criteria defined by the enterprise, often including the following:
Some of these criteria can be readily automated like WS-I basic profile compliance, others will likely require manual steps. To this end, before a service can be published it should pass through a workflow process that will verify the automatable criteria before requiring a manual approval step. A well designed SOA Governance solution will manage this workflow as a series of customizable, automatable defined process steps and will allow developers and approvers to see services at appropriate phases of this process. SOA Software’s Repository Manager and Policy Manager products combine to provide a comprehensive SOA Lifecycle Management solution. They share a common state-machine, and common meta-model providing seamless SOA asset lifecycle management capabilities.
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Architecture and Compliance As enterprises move towards SOA, their enterprise architecture teams take on an increasingly important role. Integrated SOA Governance Automation solutions provide architecture teams with the ability to ensure the efficient execution of their SOA programs.
Service Lifecycle Management
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Simple Service Consumption As the complexity of service interfaces grows to add security, reliability, and other capabilities needed for business quality services, so does the difficulty of consuming the services. Studies of the cost of building services and consumers in Fortune 500 companies shows that it can cost up to $50k to add security, reliability and monitoring capabilities to a single service, and up to $40 to add the security and reliability capabilities required to consume the service to a consuming application. As service reuse becomes more prevalent, the cost of building consumers can quickly become prohibitive. This is why SOA Software provides its Delegate to ensure simple service consumption. Using the Delegate, consumer developers can focus on implementing the business logic of their application leaving the complexity of complying with enterprise security policies, reliability models, versioning, transport, and other implementation details to the delegate. SOA Software’s Delegate is available in many forms, ranging from Java and C# SDKs, through plug-ins for common IDEs and handler sets for common containers. It is part of the design tools for many business process management solutions, allowing the process designer to drag and drop an “SOA service” into their process fully abstracting the process engine from the physical service implementation.
The Delegate abstracts the developer from the complexities of business quality service consumption including:
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Application and Transaction Management SOA is used to build real-world business applications, delivering real business value and solving real business problems. Faults and performance problems in a Web service might not appear to be a huge problem, but they may lead to a failure to respond to a customer, a misplaced order, or a failure to invoice or collect on a service or product that has been delivered. The distributed nature of service-oriented applications makes it difficult to identify and diagnose problems. For example, an unacceptable delay when a customer clicks a button on a commerce site might be caused by a connection timeout in an unrelated database that provides a logging function to a Web service that is indirectly invoked by another application called by the portal. Application support and operations teams must be alerted to these issues and must be able to identify their root cause, debug, and fix them in near real-time. These teams are often measured against Mean-Time-To-Repair, so seeing problems before they occur, and quickly finding the cause is a critical goal. SOA Software provides an industry leading Operational Governance solution for monitoring, transaction tracking, SLA management, Quality of Service, Event management, and root case analysis.
Monitoring – Last mile, first-mile and network monitoring of messages to collect real-time performance, usage, fault and message data for any service deployed on any platform. SOA Software’s Service Manager monitors services from the perspective of the consumer to ensure that consumer specific SLA’s and usage criteria are not polluted by traffic from other consumers.
SOA Software’s products are used by Fortune 500 companies to ensure continuous operation of their service-oriented applications providing a state of the art application and transaction management solution. SOA Software’s Service Manager provides a platform-independent, policy-driven SOA monitoring and management solution to ensure the performance and reliability of services throughout an SOA. It provides SLA management, real-time and historic reporting, alert and event management, transaction tracking, and dynamic management capabilities.
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Change Impact Mitigation A core benefit of service-orientation is the ability to reuse existing assets across multiple applications as service consumers. This reduces the time to develop new applications, increasing agility and reducing cost, but it also increases the potential for change to one application (service provider) to cause many other applications (service consumers) to fail. Development governance change management and consumer contract provisioning solutions will help address this challenge, but in many cases changes will be required so the enterprise must ensure that services consumers are effectively abstracted and protected from these changes.
Virtualization – Service virtualization provides companies with the ability to create virtual services that offer a stable interface (location, transport, standards, policies, messages) even when the physical service changes. Virtualization offers high-availability and load-balancing, performance and SLA monitoring and management, routing, versioning, and mediation capabilities to mitigate the impact of change at the provider on service consumers.
SOA Software’s products are used by Fortune 500 companies to ensure continuous operation of their service-oriented applications leveraging powerful change impact mitigation capabilities. SOA Software’s Service Manager provides a platform-independent, policy-driven SOA virtualization and mediation solution to ensure that services can be confidently consumed by applications on any platform without risk of change causing outages. SOA Software’s Policy Manager provides comprehensive consumer contract provisioning capabilities to track service consumers and notify them of versioning events.
One of Service Manager’s core strengths is its mediation capabilities. It offers a range of mediations including:
Service Manager can mediate between a wide range of standards, message styles (SOAP, POX, etc), message exchange patterns (REST, SOAP, MOM, etc), transports (http, https, JMS), reliablity models (WS-RM, WS-RX, MOM, etc), security tokens (SAML, Kerberos, X.509, session cookies, etc). Mediation is enabled declaratively through the standalone intermediary based on impedances between inbound messages and the requirements, capabilities, and policies of the destination service.
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B2B Service Provisioning One of the main drivers behind SOA has always been the vision of using Web services to facilitate communication between businesses, and even drive new business models. This is a valuable use for SOA and Web services, and it does present some interesting challenges. Security – In the early days of Web services, the ability to communicate machine to machine over port 80 to avoid firewall configuration issues was a much touted advantage. The reality, of course, is that sending XML traffic over port 80 introduces a potentially significant security risk. The standards community has created numerous specifications to offset this risk, but with it has added considerable complexity that can take away much of the advantage offered by Web services. The real challenge is to find a way to ensure the security of services leveraging standards like WS-Security and SAML, without making services so difficult to consume that partners and customers choose to go elsewhere. Another obvious risk is that for services to consumable outside the enterprise firewall, they must be accessible through the DMZ. In most cases customers will not, and should not, deploy their application containers into the DMZ, so they need to find a virtualization model that allows them to deploy services in the DMZ that proxy their application services. Consumer Contract Management – One way to address the challenge of providing easy access to secure services is through a consumer contract provisioning model. Consumer contract provisioning is the process of requesting or offering access to a service through a negotiated contract. For more information on consumer contract provisioning please see contracts. Identity Federation – In order to grant individuals at partner companies rights to services and business processes within your enterprise, you need to know that these people are authorized by your partner to act on their behalf. One model is for you to maintain a directory of your partner’s employees, and ask you ensure that this directory is up-to-date, although this model is bound to fail. Identity Federation offers a better solution. Through Identity Federation users within partner and customer organizations can authenticate themselves against a server in their own organization and present you with a token validated by their company. In this way you simply need to trust their company, and not the individual in question. SOA Software’s products are used by Fortune 100 companies to provide comprehensive B2B SOA provisioning capabilities driving new business models and revenue for these companies. SOA Software’s Service Manager provides a platform-independent, policy-driven SOA security and virtualization solution to ensure that internally published services can be confidently exposed to partners through the DMZ. SOA Software’s products implement all of the latest standards including comprehensive support for WS-Security, XML-Signature, XML-Encryption, SAML, XACML, and many others. For a list of supported standards please click here. SOA Software’s Policy Manager provides comprehensive consumer contract request, offer, and negotiation processes to facilitate partners requesting access to services, and the enterprise offering partners access to services.
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Security The evolution towards service-oriented architecture as the main application development and integration model for large enterprises promises great rewards in agility and cost saving, but along with these rewards come increased security risks in several areas: Message Security – Standards-based service interactions are one of the main benefit drivers in SOA. They also introduce increased risk, because a well architected system will have no room for “security by obscurity”. The standards community has made great strides in producing specifications to ensure sender and provider authenticity and authorization, and message privacy and non-repudiation. It is now up to service platform providers and service and consumer developers to take advantage of these standards to ensure the security of their applications and data. Interface Security – One of the goals of SOA is to create reusable business services. These services are often created by take data or business logic from existing applications and exposing it as a service. This means taking data or logic that was buried within an application and making it accessible, and in this process exposing it to potential threats. Security Infrastructure – The move towards enterprise SOA involves the deployment of new infrastructure solutions including registry/repository, policy management, and service management, amongst others. Each of these solutions must comply with existing enterprise security policies, or the solutions designed to ensure the security of enterprise applications can themselves become potential attack points. SOA Software’s Service Manager provides a platform-independent, policy-driven SOA security solution to ensure that all service providers enforce uniform, appropriate policies, that are implemented by all service consumers across all distributed and mainframe platforms throughout the enterprise. It provides fully featured agents to ensure last-mile security, a standalone intermediary for network-based policy enforcement and virtualization, and a client-side delegate for first-mile policy implementation. Authentication – Service Manager provides comprehensive message, consumer and end user authentication with support for all common token types including Basic Auth, SAML, X.509, Kerberos, XML-Signature, and HTTPS. It provides a security token server for Identity Federation and token exchange, offering a SAML authority as part of this capability. Authorization – Service Manager offers powerful service authorization capabilities support XACML as well as native integrations with most common enterprise security policy management solutions. Privacy – Service Manager has full support for XML-Encryption in both raw XML and WS-Security forms supporting both encryption and decryption to ensure the privacy of messages. Non-repudiation – Service Manager offers full support for raw XML and WS-Security compliance XML-Signature and signature verification to ensure message authenticity and non-repudiation. PKI – Policy Manager provides comprehensive public and private key pair management, CRL checking, and certificate management.
SOA Software’s products implement all of the latest standards including comprehensive support for WS-Security, XML-Signature, XML-Encryption, SAML, XACML, and many others. For a list of supported standards please click here.
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