Software > SOAEssentials

In early July, when vice President and research director Anne Thomas Manes presented at the Burton Group's annual Catalyst conference, she said most SOA failures are due to people and cultural issues more often than for technology issues.

A $1.5 billion global logistics company is not what many consider agile, but Dematic has proven it is just that after the Asia Pacific arm replaced its core IT architecture in 72 days with a platform built on Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

All of a sudden "green" is the "in" color. In 2007 the IT industry embraced the green data center concept. What followed was an avalanche of PR from vendor after vendor claiming that they were greener than their competitors.

The SOA concept -- developing a software architecture based on service components that can be mixed and matched as needed to reduce development time and increase application deployment flexibility -- is only a few years old, but the providers of SOA-supporting infrastructure are fast consolidating. Oracle captured the headlines with its acquisition of BEA Systems this spring, and Progress Software recently bought Iona Technologies.

IBM has announced services designed to help IT managers figure out whether their service-oriented architecture is working, a social network for IT workers and academics interested in service-oriented architecture (SOA) plus widgets for non-technical users who want to fine-tune their Web applications.

Oracle plans to buy ClearApp, maker of software for managing the performance of composite applications in SOA (service-oriented architecture) environments, the company announced Tuesday.

At its Impact conference in the US Monday, IBM announced an event-driven extension to its WebSphere platform for managing services in an SOA environment. Most SOA platforms have focused on centrally orchestrating services triggered by a process need, such as handling a customer lookup when a salesperson processes an order. But most SOA platforms have not been engineered to handle complex events, in which a pattern of activities -- both random and scheduled -- should trigger a set of services. These complex events are more common in high-transaction environments.

Curl is linking RIAs (rich Internet applications) to SOA with an update to its Curl RIA Platform Version 6.0 software development technology.