Oracle Integration

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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
As a comprehensive platform for XML and Web services security and management, the Service Manager can be used to extend the functionality of the Oracle eBusiness Suite 11.5.10 Process Manager and enable a secure, manageable Service-Oriented Architecture that leverages Oracle technology. The Service Manager provides the following security and management functionality for Web services exposed in your enterprise through Oracle 11.5.10:

Centralized Policy Management
Performance Monitoring and Reporting
Security Enablement, Enforcement and Auditing
Provisioning, Contracts and SLA management
Web Services Publishing, Search and Discovery via UDDI
Multi-protocol message transport for quality-of-service

Integration with Oracle BPEL Process Manager
SOA Software’s Service Manager can be used to extend the functionality of the Oracle BPEL Process Manager and enable a complete Business Process Management solution based on Web services.

Securing and Managing the BPEL workflow - SOA Software’s Management Point™ can be used to secure and manage the BPEL workflow because the BPEL workflow is a Web service defined using a WSDL. As a result, the communication/invocation from a client application that uses SOA Software’s Gateway™ can be secured and monitored.
Securing and Managing Web Services that are part of the BPEL workflow - In this scenario, the Management Point is used to secure and manage the underlying Web services that are part of the BPEL workflow. The BPEL workflow may have several Web services with various security and monitoring requirements which can all be managed using the Management Point.
Monitoring the BPEL workflow with SLAs - The Service Manager has the ability to monitor Web service performance and enforce SLAs that are associated with the BPEL workflow. The DESM can generate alerts in case of SLA violations.

“Real World” SOA Launch Wave Road Shows

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Attend this event to learn more about Microsoft’s “Real World” approach to SOA and gain valuable insight on the value of the next generation of “Self Service SOA” solutions. In addition, get a firsthand look through the voice of Microsoft customers and partners on how Biztalk Server, “Oslo” and other Microsoft products are used together in a service oriented approach to solve real world business challenges and deliver tangible business benefits.

SOA Software will be sponsoring and Participating in the events at the following locations:

Toronto, ON
Tuesday, November 4

Reading, England
Wednesday, November 26

New York, NY
Tuesday, December 2

St. Louis, MO
Tuesday, December 4

Event Website

SOA Software SOA Federation Solution

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SOA Software’s SOA Federation solution is a subset of its industry-leading Integrated SOA Governance Automation product family. The SOA Federation solution combines the Service Manager Network Directory standalone intermediary with a Policy Manager instance pre-configured with simplified publication and consumption approvals workflows.

SOA Software’s Network Director and Policy Manager combine to offer exceptional service virtualization, mediation, publication and discovery automation capabilities in a high-performance, reliable software solution.

They offer:

Service Virtualization – policy enforcement, tolerance/mediation, aggregation, change management/abstraction, capacity planning/management/monitoring
Trust and Management Mediation - Multi-pattern mediation (agent, delegate, proxy, relay, gateway, router, switch, pipe & filter, Policy Enforcement Point), messaging mediation, reliability mediation, standards mediation, transport mediation
Publication and Discovery Automation – registry/repository, publication approvals workflow, contract management

SOA Federation Solutions

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The SOA Federation solution offers a particular set of capabilities delivered by a combination of an SOA Intermediary, an SOA Registry/Repository, an SOA Policy Management System, and an SOA Management system.

The SOA Federation solution can be deployed independently of, or integrated with any other SOA platform or Governance solution to provide a convenient service virtualization, mediation, publication and discovery automation solution.

Service Virtualization
Service Virtualization is the creation and hosting of a new service, exposed through an SOA Intermediary. This service has its own WSDL, interfaces, endpoints and policies, but rather than executing its own business logic, it invokes another service (the virtualized service). In many ways a virtual service is a proxy for a physical service, but with a wide range of routing, mediation, security, and other governance capabilities added.

An effective SOA Federation solution should offer a simple virtualization allowing users to rapidly create and host virtual services without having to write code, or create process descriptions. The virtual service should implement its own policies and be able to declaratively mediate between inbound messages, and the requirements of the virtualized physical service.

The capabilities of virtual service include:

Policy enforcement – the virtual service should have its own policy set defining security, monitoring, reliability, and other requirements. These policies should be enforced by the SOA Intermediary hosting the virtual service.
Tolerance/mediation – one of the core goals of virtualizing services is to remove impedances between services and consumers. These impedances can be introduced by different platform versions, network topologies, policy configurations, message styles, and a whole host of other factors. Tolerance and mediation are discussed in more detail in the next section of this document.
Aggregation – virtual services can contain multiple operations taken from more than one back end service that may be deployed on multiple platforms with different policies, message styles, transports, etc. Alternatively, a virtual service could contain a subset of the operations offered by a physical service. Virtual services have their own WSDL and endpoints, so they provide an ideal way to hide the physical infrastructure from potential consumers.
Change management/abstraction – virtual services provide abstraction against change for consumers. The service provider can change the underlying physical service in a wide range of ways from something simple like adding a new endpoint on another server for load-balancing to moving the service to a new platform or even upgrading the service to a new version. The virtual service will automatically route requests to the appropriate endpoint based on policy, and can even perform transformations to model an older version of a service as needed by consumers.
Capacity planning/management/monitoring – virtual services make it easy for administrators to see how service performance is changing over time to understand that they need to provision a new endpoint, or decommission an endpoint as needed. Because the virtual service provides a stable endpoint, consumers will not be affected with the SOA intermediaries performing dynamic load-balancing in the background.

Trust and Management Mediation
One of an SOA Federation solution’s core strengths is its mediation capabilities. It should offer a range of mediations including:

Multi-pattern mediation (agent, delegate, proxy, relay, gateway, router, switch, pipe & filter, Policy Enforcement Point)
Messaging mediation (programming model and synchronicity) - useful when consumers and providers use differing call models. There are three types of message exchange pattern mediation; Sync-Async mediation (synchronous consumer wants to access asynchronous WS providers); Async-Sync mediation (asynchronous consumer wants to access synchronous WS providers); Asynch-Async mediation (asynchronous consumer wants to access asynchronous WS providers)
Reliability mediation – useful when unreliable consumers need to consume reliable services, or when reliable consumers need to consume unreliable services.
Standards mediation - useful when the consumers use and the providers expect differing WS standards. The SOA Federation solution handles this mismatch through declarative configuration. Several types of syntactic standards mediation are available: WS-Security, WS-Addressing, WS-Routing, and WS-Reliable Messaging.
Transport mediation - useful when consumers and providers use differing transport protocols. Common examples of this are SOAP/HTTP consumers who want to call non-soap message driven apps such as POX/JMS

The SOA Federation solution should be able to mediate between a wide range of standards, message styles (SOAP, POX, etc), MEPs (REST, SOAP, MOM, etc), transports (http, https, JMS), reliability models (WS-RM, WS-RX, MOM, etc), security tokens (SAML, Kerberos, X.509, session cookies, etc). Mediation should be enabled declaratively through the standalone intermediary based on impedances between inbound messages and the requirements, capabilities, and policies of the destination service.

Publication and Discovery Automation
One of things that is often overlooked, but is most valuable, about an SOA Federation solution is the capabilities around publication and discovery automation. The SOA Federation solution includes a registry/repository with built-in workflow processes to govern the ability of service owners to publish and virtualize their services, and potential consumers to request contracts for those services.

The SOA Federation solution should facilitate this process by providing both standards (UDDI Publish API) and UI/Wizard based mechanisms service owners can use to publish and virtualize their services into the SOA Federation solution. Of course, this is not enough. The publish operation should typically not actually result in the service being generally available, but rather should result in a request to the SOA Federation system administrators to approve the publication. Once the request is approved, a virtual instance of the service should be visible to potential consumer who can then request access to it via a consumer contract provision process (see below).

Optionally, the request approval process could be part of a broader SDLC governance process, and could be subject to compliance policy validation. These capabilities are more normally considered to part of a comprehensive enterprise SOA Governance solution, and should be available as an upgrade to the SOA Federation solution.

Of course, once services are published and available in a standardized way, consumers need to be able to find them, request access to them, and consume them with confidence that the services will meet their requirements.

The SOA Federation solution should provide a standards-based registry allowing application architects and developers to search and browse for services. Once they find a suitable service (suitability being determined by a wide range of factors from description, interfaces, schemas, service metadata, attached documents, policies, published service levels, and even actual real-time and historic performance and availability data) they should be able to request access to the service with specific service levels. This access request should be subject to a simple negotiation and approval process resulting in a defined, agreed contract between the consumer and the provider.

Enterprise Service Bus

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Some ESB vendors will argue that their service bus products are the right choice as enterprise SOA Federation solutions. ESBs provide valuable functionality for integrating existing systems and building composite applications, they are not well suited to providing enterprise SOA Federation capabilities.

ESBs fall short in the following areas:

Ease of use – most ESBs are driven by a application development model. They are designed to allow developers to create applications, and manage adapter frameworks to provide broad connectivity to legacy systems. To virtualize an existing service using most ESBs requires complex configuration steps, and in many cases programming tasks, especially if any mediation is required. An SOA Federation solution on the other hand is explicitly designed to facilitate simple federation and virtualization with declarative policy and technology impedance mediation.
Policy silos – many ESBs provide their own, internally programmed policy models. They can quickly become policy silos creating and enforcing local policies through programming, rather than implementing and enforcing centrally defined enterprise policies. An SOA Federation solution understands standards-based policies for services it exposes and consumes, and offers declarative mediation between the policy capabilities of consumers, the policies enforced by virtual services, and the policy requirements of physical services.
No service discovery – the current crop of ESBs are service runtimes with no discovery mechanism. They don’t offer any mechanism for publishing the services they expose so that they can be discovered by 3rd parties. An SOA Federation solution must include standards-based service discovery capabilities for development (UDDI) and runtime (WS-MetadataExchange) service, endpoint, and policy discovery.
Lack of a governance process – ESBs don’t provide an mechanism for automating the process of determining whether a service should be published or not. SOA Federation solutions include a lightweight, extensible model allowing users to request the federation of a service, and administrators to approve or reject the request.
No contract model – ESBs don’t have any understanding of the concept of a service consumer. They have no way to offer service consumers specific guarantees of service level, or even grant or deny access to their exposed services based on a contract approval workflow. An SOA Federation solution includes a lightweight, extensible contract workflow allowing potential consumers to request access with specific service level guarantees, and the service provider can grant or deny this request.
Technology impedances – many ESBs are evolutions of EAI platforms or message-oriented middleware. They often support only a limited subset of the messaging, transport, and policy standards expected in enterprise SOA. It is common for different ESBs to implement services in such a way that they are not directly consumable by other vendor’s products. Additionally, ESBs will generally not be well suited for DMZ type deployments, so cannot safely expose services outside the enterprise or regional firewall. An SOA Federation solution offers messaging, transport and policy mediation, as well as the ability to virtualize services into secure, DMZ resident intermediaries to remove these technology impedances.
Semantic, not syntactic – most ESBs offer strong mediation solutions, but it is not the kind of mediation required for service federation. ESBs offer semantic (i.e. content) mediation, while the SOA Federation solution focuses on syntactic (i.e. envelope) mediation. An ESB can do a very good job of mapping from one business document to another, but it is not designed to map from one messaging style, standard, transport, or policy to another. SOA Federation solutions provide declarative syntactic mediation capabilities to minimize the impact of administrative, organizational, trust and technology impedances.

SOA Federation Capabilities
SOA Federation solutions focus on taking existing services and ensuring that they meet the requirements of enterprise SOA. To achieve this, the SOA Federation solutions offer a set of core capabilities:

Uniform Policy Management - Uniform Policy Management ensures consistent policy definition, implementation, enforcement, validation, and audit through all stages of the lifecycle, and across all distributed and mainframe platforms. It ensures that services can be leveraged as first-class citizens throughout an enterprise SOA by complying with enterprise policies that are uniform across all platforms.
Service Virtualization - Service Virtualization provides location-transparency, service mobility, impedance tolerance and reliable service delivery without requiring a re-platforming of existing platforms or introducing yet another service platform to support the required solution architecture.
Trust and Management Mediation - Trust and Management Mediation ensures interoperability across disparate partners and platforms, trust enablement and trust mediation complementing threat prevention systems. It provides provide last-mile security, metric collection and reporting, SLA monitoring and management, to ensure that services are governed, managed, and secured, and policy implementation and mediation to allow consumers to communicate with a wide range of mission critical business services exposed from any platform.
Change Impact Mitigation - Change Impact Mitigation provides change management and impact analysis processes integrated with the governance workflow to ensure that changes to services or other assets don’t cause major outages by breaking the consumption model.
Consumer Contract Provisioning - Consumer Contract Provisioning provides offer, request, negotiation, and approval workflows for service access, capacity, SLA and policy contracts. It ensures that the service provides know which applications and users are consuming their services and allows them to treat different consumers with different priorities and service levels.

We will address the technology solutions required to address these capabilities later in this document.

SOA Federation Anti-Patterns
ESBs offer valuable capabilities that SOA Federation solutions should explicitly not address:

Application Composition – most ESBs include process design tools that allow developers to create composite applications tying together different services and applications. An SOA Federation solution is explicitly not in the business of creating new applications and services. The SOA Federation solution can create virtual services from sets of existing services, but it does not provide a mechanism for modeling business logic.
Enterprise Application Integration – many ESBs are the evolution of EAI solutions. They include comprehensive adapter frameworks providing connectivity to a wide range of legacy systems. SOA Federation solutions will not provide this connectivity – they will focus on service federation to turn existing services into governed service endpoints.
Complex Transformations – One of the core capabilities of an ESB is the ability to map one message schema to another, performing complex transformation operations along the way. SOA Federation solutions will offer syntactic transformation, i.e. the ability to mediate between different message formats and syntaxes, but will not typically provide comprehensive content mediation.
Stateful Orchestration – ESBs typically provide process orchestration engines built on top of the message-oriented middle backbone of the ESB. These orchestration engines are capable of orchestrating long-running business transactions through stored state. The SOA Federation solution should be able to route and virtualize long-running transactions, but will not offer any form of process orchestration.

SOA Federation Use Cases

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SOA Federation solutions are sometimes called shared-services solutions, or SOA infrastructure. It is important to note that SOA Infrastructure is very different from SOI (or service-oriented infrastructure). SOI provides common IT infrastructure services (single-sign-on, user self service, etc) in a service oriented way. SOA Infrastructure ensures that services in the context of SOA are relevant, consumable, policy compliant, and aligned with demand from the enterprise.

SOA Federation is a subset of a comprehensive SOA Infrastructure solution. To understand the function of an SOA Federation solution in the context of the scenarios described earlier we will examine a few common use-cases:

Publish services for sharing
One of the most basic use-cases for an SOA Federation solution is the ability for a service creator to request the publication of their service into the Federation solution where it can be discovered and consumed by interested parties.

Consume Shared Services
Of course, once services are published and available in a standardized way, consumers need to be able to find them, request access to them, and consume them with confidence that the services will meet their requirements.

Consume External Services
Another common use-case is the need for internal applications to consume external services. The architect or developer of an external application might find the WSDL of an external service via Internet search or a simple referral. In most instances, the organization won’t want, or allow, internal applications to directly consume external services. They won’t have any way to monitor the performance and availability of the service, or to control which internal applications are consuming these external services.

The SOA Federation solution allows the architect or developer of the internal application to request the virtualization of an external service by submitting its WSDL. The SOA Federation solution administrator can then approve or reject the request and generate a virtual instance of the service with its own WSDL and with endpoints inside the corporate network. The virtual service can then monitor the service for service levels, authenticate and authorize the requests from the internal application(s) and implement any policies required by the external service.

Platform Tolerance
In many cases it application architects or developers may wish to access a service that their application’s platform isn’t capable of consuming. There are many potential types of impedance between consumers and services including but not limited to:

Different versions or implementations of standards
Different transports
Different message exchange patterns
Different synchronicity models
Different security policy requirements
Different reliability models

One of the most important roles of an SOA Federation solution is to use service virtualization to mediate between these impedances to provide a highly tolerant and interoperable environment. Tolerance can be seen as the opposite side of the governance coin, but in reality governance and tolerance go together, the goal should be to ensure that services are adequately governed while remaining tolerant of impedances.

SOA Federation

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Most large enterprises have already made several steps along the road towards enterprise SOA, or at the very least already have a number of Web services deployed. Most of these companies have multiple platforms from multiple vendors, distributed across organization, administrative and trust boundaries. The platforms themselves create technology boundaries. Customers are quickly realizing that they need to find a way to share services between these technology, organizational, administrative and trust silos.

Some vendors try to position ESB products as the solution to this problem, the reality is that ESBs are service platforms themselves that often reside within, or even create these silos. They are better suited for system integration and service construction tasks, leveraging their built-in development, workflow, and adapter frameworks.

SOA Federation provides the solution for this type of service sharing. It promotes some specific best-practices that enable service sharing across defined boundaries. The pages below delve deeping into the concepts of SOA Federation.

For an introduction into how companies would leverage SOA Federation please see: SOA Federation Scenarios

For a description of specific use-cases please see: SOA Federation Use Cases

For a description of what an SOA Federation solution is please see SOA Federation Solutions, this page includes descriptions of Service Virtualization, Trust and Management Mediation, and Publication and Discovery Automation.

For more information about SOA Software’s SOA Federation solution with Network Director and Policy Manager, please click here.

An SOA Federation solution does share some characteristics with an Enterprise Service Bus, but it offers both more and less capabilities than an ESB in important areas. This link examines the concepts involved using specific use-cases and examples to identify the requirements for an effective SOA Federation solution.

SOA Federation Scenarios

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SOA Federation solutions can be applied to a wide range of problems. For the purposes of this discussion we have chosen three common scenarios where SOA Federation solutions can offer particular value.

Common Services
One of the goals of most enterprise SOA programs is to identify and deliver a set of common services that can be leveraged throughout the extended enterprise by different applications, technologies, and teams.

Services that are intended to be shared widely throughout the enterprise must comply with a defined set of constraints:

They must be broadly relevant
They must be consumable across a wide range of platforms
They must enforce and comply with consistent enterprise policies
They must be discoverable and visible across all applicable platforms, organizations, and teams
They must offer a mechanism to give consumers confidence that the service will deliver appropriate service levels

Ensuring that common services comply with these constraints is most often the job of an enterprise SOA CoE. It can, however, fall to individual service owners (i.e. the teams that create services) to find a way to expose their services to other parts of the company in such a way that they meet these requirements.

To ensure the relevance of common services, the SOA Federation solution should allow service owners to propose their services as candidate common services, and provide a lightweight approvals process for administrators (CoE staff for example) to accept or reject the services. Depending on how much governance and governance automation is needed in this process, the SOA Federation solution could provide a comprehensive compliance policy validation framework to verify that service interfaces comply with enterprise, industry, and regulatory guidelines and requirements.

As the complexity of service interfaces grow to provide enhanced security and reliability capabilities, the set of consumers capable of consuming the services shrinks. To make common services consumable across a wide range of platforms, the SOA Federation solution should provide a virtualization mechanism with strong mediation capabilities. It should define and deploy virtual service endpoints that abstract service consumers from the implementation specifics of the actual service. To achieve this, the SOA Federation solution must provide tolerance to ensure that the widest possible set of consumers can consume a service by making sure that the service is tolerant of different message types, policies, transport, and many other variables.

To ensure that common services comply with consistent enterprise policies, the SOA Federation solution needs to provide a uniform policy enforcement model, allowing for consistent, standard-based policy definition. The solution should be able to integrate with existing policy systems, and should be able to audit when policies are enforced.

To make common services discoverable and visible across all applicable platforms, organizations, and teams, the SOA Federation solution needs to provide a catalog of common services. This catalog should include all the information needed to consume the service, including interface definition, endpoint location, and policy information. This catalog should be accessible using standards like UDDI and WS-MetadataExchange to facilitate broad access.

In order to give consumers the confidence that common services will meet service level requirements for performance and availability, the SOA Federation solution needs to offer a consumer contract provisioning capability. This capability will provide a mechanism for consumers to request access with specific service level commitments, allowing administrators and service owners to negotiate, approve or reject the request. The contracts also provide administrators and service owners with the data they need to effectively plan capacity for the common services.

Enterprise SaaS
Enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions are becoming more and more widely adopted. These solutions often offer Web services for easy integration with internal enterprise applications, however, it may not always be easy (or appropriate) for an application to consume these services. The role of the SOA Federation solution is very similar to the role discussed above under common services, although the enterprise SaaS use case does differ in some important areas.

The core concerns are largely the same. The SOA Federation solution needs to ensure that SaaS services look and behave the same as if they were any other common service.

They must be consumable across a wide range of platforms
They must enforce and comply with consistent enterprise policies
They must offer a mechanism to give consumers confidence that the service will deliver appropriate service levels

Where differences emerge is in the broad applicability (or not) of the SaaS services. In this way the requirements for broad relevance and discoverability change subtly:

SaaS Services must be relevant to a governed set of internal applications – the SOA Federation solution will still need to provide a lightweight approval process, but in this case it is likely that the request for virtualization of a SaaS service will come from a potential consumer of that service.
They must be discoverable and visible across all applicable platforms, organizations, and teams – the SOA Federation solution should only make SaaS services visible to carefully chosen parts of the enterprise, and should leverage the consumer contract provisioning process to govern which applications are allowed to access these services.

ESB Federation
Most large enterprises either have, or will have multiple different ESBs from multiple vendors. In many cases these ESBs will be used as local integration servers to build applications, often exposing these applications as services.

The challenge comes when a team in another part of the extended enterprise wants to consume the service exposed by the localized ESB instance. There are likely to be considerable impedances between the consumer application and the provider:

The service may require authentication from a domain to which the consumer does not belong and does not have access
The consumer may want guaranteed service levels
The consumer and provider may be technically incompatible
The consumer may not have physical access to the service (e.g. the service may reside on a local piece of message-oriented middleware)

In these cases, the service provider will need to find a way to expose their services as Governed endpoints. This is similar to the common services use-case described above, but rather than relying on a central facility that may have its own constraints (see above), the service provider will run their own SOA Federation solution to virtualize their services to ensure:

They must be broadly relevant
They must be consumable across a wide range of platforms
They must enforce and comply with consistent enterprise policies
They must be discoverable and visible across all applicable platforms, organizations, and teams
They must offer a mechanism to give consumers confidence that the service will deliver appropriate service levels

The reverse is equally true. There will be cases where an ESB needs to consume a service from outside its local domain. In this case it needs to comply with the constraints imposed by the 3rd party service, including a wide set of likely technology constraints.

Webinar - 10 steps to Successful SOA Governance

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November 18th 9am
Like jumping from a plane without a parachute, target shooting with your eyes closed, or assembling a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with no box-top picture to serve as a reference—such is the plight of the organization that attempts to adopt a Service-oriented approach to technology and business in the absence of governance. In this session, thought leader Kyle Gabhart of Web Age Solutions and Ian Goldsmith of SOA Software will outline 10 steps to successful SOA Governance.

Presenters:

Ian Goldsmith, VP of Product Management, SOA Software
Kyle Gabhart, Web Age Solutions

SOA World 2008 Conference and Expo

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“Seven Steps to SOA”
November 20th at 2:30-3:05
This session will explore the seven key success factors that global enterprises must embrace in order to realize the full benefits of an enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture. The presentation will also cover the obvious, and not so obvious pitfalls that can be avoided with proper SOA planning. It discusses the various stages of SOA adoption describing the technologies, processes, and best-practices available to help companies succeed in their SOA initiatives. The 7 steps to SOA are:

Create/Expose Services
Register Services
Secure Services
Manage (monitor) Services
Mediate and Virtualize Services
Govern the SOA
Integrate Services (ESB)

Speaker Bio:
Ian Goldsmith is Vice President of product management for SOA Software the leading provider of Integrated SOA Governance automation solutions with award winning products including Repository Manager, Policy Manager, Service Manager and SOLA. Previously as Vice President of Technology Strategy at Critical Path he drove Identity Management and wireless product strategies, including the creation and launch of its market leading meta-directory. Mr Goldsmith focuses his energies on technology adoption in large enterprises, having successfully completed several cryptography and secure messaging projects with US and international defense and intelligence agencies. He holds a masters degree in computer science from Cambridge University and is a serial speaker and panelist at technology conferences.

Session Details
Register for this event

About SOA World:
The 14th International SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 West will take place on November 19-21, 2008 at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

The most important business benefit that service-oriented architecture (SOA) can provide is the ability to respond swiftly to change: changes in the market, the supply chain, strategic processes, regulations. Make sure that you are able in 2008/9 to declare your own company’s SOA journey toward such responsiveness and agility a success. Come to SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 West and learn just how much SOA can do for your business and for your developers.

There is no other event in the USA with as rich and varied opportunities for learning, networking, and tracking innovation occurring in the IT infrastructure, architecture, and standards communities. The speakers are all seasoned SOA practitioners with a passion for helping to usher in the new era of IT agility made possible by standardized best practices, pervasive communication & data protocols, and a general movement toward openness and interop in the industry.

Come benefit from their passion at SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 West, co-located with DataServices World 2008 West and the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo. Make November 2008 the month you secure your technology path to a more flexible enterprise!

SOA Software Demonstrates Enhanced Governance for Microsoft “Dublin” and Windows Communication Found

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Los Angeles, Calif., October 27, 2008 – SOA Software, the leading Integrated SOA Governance vendor, announced today that is has added support for Microsoft’s extensions to the Windows Server application server (code-named “Dublin”) and Windows Communication Framework (WCF) version 4.0. The company is also providing a preview of its new governance models for the “Oslo” modeling platform at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference.

SOA Software has extended the traditional models of enterprise security within Microsoft’s .NET Framework and Windows Server. Microsoft’s market-leading application server is being enhanced through new capabilities in .NET Framework 4.0 (specifically Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0) and with a set of extensions to the application server role codenamed “Dublin”. SOA Software extends these efforts to include a unified governance automation best-practices framework for WCF service providers and consumers. SOA Software helps enterprise customers build the right services, build services the right way, and ensure that their services are behaving correctly.

SOA Software’s products built to work with the enhanced Windows application server help Microsoft customers:

Ensure that services they identify, design and build using .NET Framework and WCF are relevant to and consumable by applications they design, build and deploy using other platforms like SAP and IBM.
Make services they expose from applications running on .NET Framework and WCF visible to and compliant with enterprise policies defined, enforced and audited across other platforms; and make services they design and build using other platforms like SAP and open source environments visible to and compliant with enterprise policies defined, enforced and audited across their .NET Framework and WCF applications.
Promote, ensure and formalize consistent alignment between demand from service consumers and the supply of services through Consumer Contract Provisioning.

“Today at PDC, Microsoft is previewing some of the coming enhancements to the .NET Framework and Windows Server, which advance the capabilities of our application server while still allowing developers to use their existing skills with Microsoft Visual Studio, the .NET Framework and IIS,” said Burley Kawasaki, director in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft Corporation. “SOA Software’s governance automation products combined with Microsoft’s .NET Framework and “Dublin” extensions to the Windows Server application server help customers to maximize their SOA vision.”

SOA Software’s framework brings a governed SOA methodology to developers, including centralized policy management for WCF and continuous compliance and validation for Microsoft Team Foundation Server. This framework provides custom bindings, channels and service hosts that make the job of implementing and enforcing enterprise-wide security a transparent and consistent quality of the “Dublin” run-time architecture. The cost and effort required for coding, deployment and operations are greatly reduced because security, compliance and audit become things an administrator checks off via a centralized console, and the resulting policy documents get pushed to Windows application server for implementation, enforcement and monitoring.

“The .NET Framework 4.0 enhancements - along with the improved manageability and standardized application hosting capabilities provided by “Dublin” - provide enterprise customers with a best-in-class platform for developing, deploying, running and evolving their composite applications,” said Frank Martinez, executive vice president of SOA Software. “These enhancements will allow customers to unify both lightweight composition and process-driven integration techniques through a consistent unified declarative programming model for rich composite applications. This will help simplify the way in which SOA Software’s Integrated Governance Automation solutions can be used to preserve the fidelity of the governance models, structures and mechanisms supporting their enterprise SOA programs.”

Microsoft’s “Oslo” modeling platform consists of a repository for sharing and linking of model artifacts, a textual modeling language that provides a shared meta-model for developers, and visual modeling tools for designing and editing models. SOA Software enhances “Oslo” by providing holistic governance automation that delivers consistent governance of models, services, policies, and a wide range of related artifacts throughout enterprise SOA programs. SOA Software’s Repository Manager and Policy Manager will offer deep integration with the “Oslo” repository and tools to make “Oslo” a Governed Platform and ensure the end-to-end fidelity of governance models, structures, and mechanisms. This will help enterprises confidently leverage “Oslo” applications.

SOA Software is attending the Microsoft PDC 2008 conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center booth 1014.

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.

SOA Software Update - October 2008

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SOA Governance for Oracle

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SOA Software’s products provide Integrated SOA Governance Automation for the Oracle SOA Suite. This allows customers to confidently use Oracle and BEA products as part of a heterogeneous enterprise SOA environment sharing services with other commercial SOA platforms like IBM WebSphere, Microsoft, and SAP, as well as RedHat and other open source providers.

Oracle customers add SOA Software’s Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution to the Oracle SOA Suite to:

Ensure that services they identify, design and build using their Oracle products are relevant and consumable to applications they design, build and deploy using other technologies like Microsoft and IBM.
Make services they expose from applications running on Oracle SOA Suite products visible to and compliant with enterprise policies defined, enforced and audited across other platforms; and make services they design and build using other platforms like Microsoft and open source environments visible to and compliant with enterprise policies defined, enforced and audited across by their Oracle SOA Suite applications.
Promote, ensure and formalize consistent alignment between demand from service consumers and the supply of services through Consumer Contract Provisioning.

SOA Software’s platform-independent Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution promotes the use of best-practices throughout an enterprise SOA program regardless of where services and consumers are designed, built, deployed and operated. Policy Manager, Repository Manager and Service Manager integrate seamlessly with development and runtime products from most commercial platforms including SAP, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, as well as RedHat and other open source providers. They offer deep integration with the Oracle SOA Suite components including; Oracle BPEL Process Manager, and Oracle Service Bus, as well as the core Oracle Application Server, and products in the Oracle SOA Governance suite including Oracle Service Registry and Oracle Enterprise Repository.

Webinar - SOA Development Governance Best Practices

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Recorded October, 2008
In the past year, Service Oriented Architecture has gone from “the talk of the town” to solid reality. Gartner, Inc. argues that the continued rise in the popularity of SOA “requires disciplined governance to achieve the promised reuse.” Businesses must get SOA right from the start in order to prevent projects from turning into merely A Bunch of Services (ABOS) - point-to-point spaghetti code of a different form!

In this session, Brent Carlson, Sr. vice president of technology at SOA Software will explain how to initiate governance at the design and development phase and carry it through operations. Carlson will discuss the role of an integrated SOA Governance Automation in keeping IT properly aligned with high-level business processes. He will also walk attendees through Development Governance best practices. Finally, Carlson will address the right products many companies are now utilizing to meet their SOA goals.

BienTech

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Founded in 2006, San Diego based BienTech Int is a Private, Minority/Woman, Owned Small Business,

Registered & Certified by the State of California, State Minority, State Woman Small Business Enterprise . ITAR Cert.
Diversified Professional Services in
3 focus Sectors:
- Information Technology, Acquisition Services, IT Governance
- Maritime Security Communications and C4ISR
- Sciences, Engineering -Business Solutions Support

http://www.bientech.net/

AppLabs

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AppLabs is the world’s largest independent testing, quality management and certification solutions company. With over a decade of experience, AppLabs has become a trusted partner to more than 600 companies, providing both quality assurance and third-party validation. AppLabs goes beyond technical expertise when it comes to IT services and offers customers rigorous risk mitigation processes, a singular focus on quality, expert project management, communication and global delivery capabilities. Headquartered in Philadelphia, the company maintains advanced testing facilities in the US, India and the Europe.

http://www.applabs.com/

Jackpine

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http://www.jackpinetech.com

Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit

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Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a reality no organization can afford to ignore. It fundamentally reshapes how you think, build and deliver applications. But SOA is not pursued in a vacuum, it needs to be part of a continuous IT modernization strategy that seeks to optimize your resources, and dynamically align with the rest of your business.

The challenges with both SOA and Modernization abound - and depend on your level of maturity, business model, organizational culture, and application environment.

What’s in it for you? Plenty!

5 new tracks, including 3 with a 100% SOA focus, organized by maturity level:

Initiating a SOA Effort
Building on Initial SOA Success
Delivering on Advanced SOA
Succeeding with IT Modernization & Application Strategy
Embracing New Era Application Development Practices

60+ track sessions, keynotes, case studies and workshops, providing answers to critical questions such as:

How to make the business case for SOA or move to advanced, enterprise-wide SOA?
Which patterns, models, and processes are most effective for service design?
How do you govern and manage SOA effectively?
What’s the best way to modernize your existing applications environment?
How do you embrace SaaS, open source, and agility while pursuing SOA?
What specific best practices should you adopt in a B2B, multi-enterprise context?

Brand-new sessions on:

The future of SOA and application development
How data and processes fit into your SOA strategy
Service-oriented development and service design
Governance and organization
B2B SOA and multi-enterprise integration
SaaS, Cloud and Application Platform as a Service
Application Strategy and Modernization

Special Keynote by Author Malcolm Gladwell, and a complimentary copy of his soon-to-be-released book Outliers for all keynote attendees!

Event Web site
Register for this event

SOA Software Announces Expanded SOA Governance for Microsoft .NET Framework

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Los Angeles, Calif., October 6, 2008 – SOA Software, a leading Integrated SOA Governance Automation vendor, today announced that it has expanded certification of the Microsoft .NET Framework to include the Microsoft Managed Services Engine (MSE) as a Governed Service Platform. Building on previous certifications of Microsoft BizTalk Server and the .NET Framework, this expansion allows customers to confidently use MSE as part of a heterogeneous enterprise SOA environment sharing services with other commercial SOA platforms like SAP NetWeaver, IBM WebSphere, BEA, and Oracle, as well as RedHat and other open source providers.

Certified Governed Service Platform status means that customers can be confident that their platforms will not 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.

SOA Software has provided custom Windows Communication Foundation bindings and an extensible channel stack to provide additional governance capabilities to enterprises using the MSE for service virtualization. Security administrators can centrally define policies for services through SOA Software’s Policy ManagerTM leveraging automated governance approval processes. Once approved, the MSE can dynamically leverage the policy exposed via WS-MetadataExchange to ensure consistent policy enforcement at multiple levels of granularity.

SOA Software provides channels for; audit, monitoring, SLA, faults/events, dynamic routing, message recording, and security including Kerberos, mutual auth SSL, username token, authorization (XACML), trust (SAML), basic auth (LDAP). More channels are on their way; in some cases built by customers and partners using SOA Software’s published APIs.

“The certification of Governed Service Platforms advances the discipline of Integrated SOA Governance Automation,” said Frank Martinez, executive vice president of SOA Software. “Microsoft is deploying the MSE to provide customers with advanced service virtualization capabilities and along with SOA Software’s membership in the Business Process Alliance (BPA), this certification gives them the confidence that SOA Software’s products will preserve the fidelity of the governance models, structures and mechanisms supporting their enterprise SOA program.”

Customers will add SOA Software’s Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution to the .NET Framework and MSE in order to:

Enable and coordinate enterprise-level Service Lifecycle management across the virtual services through automation and workflow tailored to fit an organization’s roles and policies
Leverage SOA software’s end-to-end policy support between clients and services to streamline the effort necessary to enable enterprise governance models
Make services they expose from applications running on .NET Framework visible to and compliant with enterprise policies defined, enforced and audited across other platforms; and make services they design and build using other platforms like SAP and open source environments visible to and compliant with enterprise policies defined, enforced and audited across their .NET Framework applications.
Promote, ensure and formalize consistent alignment between demand from service consumers and the supply of services through Consumer Contract Provisioning.
Leverage the strengths of Microsoft’s service enablement and adaptation capabilities with SOA Software’s closed loop governance model.

SOA Software’s platform-independent Integrated SOA Governance Automation solution promotes the use of best-practices throughout an enterprise SOA program regardless of where services and consumers are designed, built, deployed and operated. SOA Software’s Solutions offer deep integration with the Microsoft SOA and Business Process solutions including: .NET Framework, BizTalk Server, Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.

“SOA Software aligns well with our strategy to help customers enable a high level of agility with a rich governance model through dynamic behaviors and centralized configuration,” said Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft Corp. “Its Policy Manager provides robust service lifecycle and policy management capabilities that allow our customers to help maximize the security and performance of their virtual services.”

SOA Software and Microsoft
Our continued membership in the Microsoft BPA, provides an ongoing program for Microsoft and SOA Software to work together on a wide range of SOA initiatives to ensure their joint solutions meet the SOA and Business Process Management needs of enterprise customers.

Microsoft customers take advantage of SOA Software for seamless, heterogeneous SOA Governance, Security and Management integration with their Microsoft applications to ensure interoperability across disparate partners and platforms.
SOA Software’s products deliver mission-critical SOA governance capabilities to customers using Microsoft .NET and BizTalk Server. They provide Closed-loop Governance, Uniform Policy Management, Heterogeneous Governance Automation, Dynamic Policy Enforcement and Implementation, and Trust Mediation and Bridging.

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 500 million 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 Expands European Operations

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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.

Compuware and SOA Software Partner for Mainframe SOA

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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.

Legacy discovery and rationalization
Production service enablement
Enterprise service integration
Service quality assurance and testing
Legacy optimization

“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.”
The first deliverable from this relationship is a joint seminar series starting on Thursday October 16th in Montreal, Canada. The seminar series will examine the role of the mainframe in enterprise SOA, and will describe the value and benefit of the joint Compuware/SOA Software solutions. If you wish to attend, please contact us at
For more information about this partnership please visit: http://www.soa.com/mainframe for SOA Software’s SOLA, and http://www.compuware.ca/en/solutions/soa/offering.htm for Compuware professional services

About 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 Demonstrates Performance and Reliability in SAP® Co-Innovation Lab

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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:

More easily identify, design and build their own services using SAP NetWeaver that are relevant and consumable to non-SAP applications, such as the applications they design, build and deploy using technologies from other vendors such as Microsoft and IBM
Make services they expose from applications running on SAP NetWeaver visible to and compliant with enterprise policies that are defined, enforced and audited across other platforms. This helps the services they design and build using other platforms from other vendors and open source environments visible to and compliant with enterprise policies that are defined, enforced and audited across SAP NetWeaver
Further promote and formalize consistent alignment between demand from service consumers and the supply of services through Consumer Contract Provisioning

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
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 Announces Record Growth in Production Environments

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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.

Compuware

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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.

http://www.compuware.ca/en/solutions/soa/offering.htm

SOA Software Selected by AlwaysOn as Top Private Company For The Third Consecutive Year

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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.

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

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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

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SOA Software is proud to announce a third consecutive year winning an Always On Award
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Enterprise SOA and the Mainframe Solutions

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Jump to:

What is Mainframe SOA?
Essential Components of Mainframe SOA
SOLA - the only Mainframe SOA Solution
Build Your Own
SOLA - Fully Assembled, Governance Built In
Enterprise SOA is more than just a jigsaw puzzle
Why can “free” be expensive?
SOLA Cost Savings
SOLA Performance - CPU time is money
SOLA Stability
SOLA Features and Advantages
SOLA Development Environment
SOLA Deployment Container
Future Releases
SOLA Governance

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:

An effective, functioning service-oriented architecture requires governance, and the ability to share services across multiple business units and enterprises. It’s easy to build Web services. You could build 10 of them in an afternoon. But, then you end up with a JBOWS architecture (Just a Bunch of Web Services), which will grow into a different sort of SOA; a Spaghetti-Oriented Architecture.
Joe McKendrick, analyst and editor with Webservices.org
SOA is a true systemic change in the way you approach enterprise architecture. That’s where the value is, and not just Web service-enabling your systems, or purchasing and implementing products with the “SOA hype label” bound to them.
Dave Linthicum, well known author, professor and writer

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).