Welcome to the SOA Spotlight

The SOA Spotlight is your one-stop source for news and analysis from InfoWorld in addition to valuable white papers and other valuable resources from key players in the SOA marketplace.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents the biggest change in enterprise IT since the advent of the Internet. Its mandate to refashion applications as services requires a transformation of technical approach, IT workflow, and business planning. A successful SOA strategy, resulting in cost savings and a highly flexible application infrastructure, hinges on reliable information from leading technologists and early adopters that have already begun to reap the benefits.

SOA News and Analysis

Competitors ask FCC to block AT&T, BellSouth merger 
Slow progress for 802.11n standards 
SSL VPNs come of age 
Shareholder suit slams Vonage IPO 
Asia approaches 800 million mobile users 

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Featured Resources

SOA Readiness Self-Assessment Tool
Find out how you can benefit from Service-Oriented Architecture by taking BEA's SOA Self-Assessment, a web-based application that will aid in organizing your approach to SOA. This assessment is based on BEA's SOA Domain Model and provides a complementary SOA benchmark report that includes a customized SOA Maturity Profile, numerical and graphical rating against the commercial peer group, recommendations for improving your SOA readiness, and a list of available resources focused on SOA.

Take the SOA Readiness Assessment

SOA Webinar:
Turning IT Vision
into Business Value
Enhancing IT agility and speeding new services to market present critical challenges. Verizon Wireless, together with BEA, is implementing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to accelerate time to market of critical customer services from bill payment to plan upgrades, and equipment purchases to technical support. Get an inside look at how Verizon Wireless is taking a smart, measured approach to SOA and building for the future while continuing to see the return on older IT investments.

Register to view this Webinar

From Pilot to Payoff: SOA Hits its Stride
Download this InfoWorld white paper, sponsored by BEA, and discover the driving forces and key trends behind the rapid adoption of Service Oriented Architecture. IDG Research Group surveyed more than 500 business and IT professionals. They're responses reveal a lot. See how high SOA's promise to deliver impressive results will push SOA expenditures in the next 12 months -- and how many respondents are now engaged in departmental or enterprise-wide SOA projects. Get these top professionals' views on critical software governance, key technology issues, potential barriers to SOA implementation and abilities they want in a vendor. This concise fact-filled document can help you better align your SOA initiatives with your organization's most important business requirements.

Register to download this white paper.

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Featured Resource

HP

www.hp.com

At HP, we believe a Service-Oriented Architecture is essential in the journey to the Adaptive Enterprise - where business and IT are synchronized to capitalize on change. To help customers realize the advantages of SOA, we take an architectural, service-centric approach, providing SOA implementation planning, integration, and management. Our offerings include end-to-end SOA services, support for customer choice of middleware vendors, HP OpenView SOA Manager, and world-class server and storage products. Coupled with our expertise in open, standards-based, multiple-platform and heterogeneous operating environments, HP offerings enable customers to plan, build, and manage SOA implementations to meet their specific needs.

Register to access HP's microsite

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Featured Resource

Getting Started: Your Guide to SOA Success White Paper

More and more organizations are turning to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to increase productivity, enhance operational efficiency and agility, and align their IT infrastructures with business strategies. This white paper, prepared by the Software AG SOA Competency Center, gives you insights into key considerations that can help you successfully launch an SOA. Use this guide to understand best practices that can get your organization off to the right start.

Register to download this white paper

crossvision™ Launch Webinar: Software AG Unveils the New SOA Suite

AberdeenGroup reports businesses can save billions of dollars by implementing SOA. This video webcast includes an introduction to crossvision, Software AG's new SOA suite. Watch the webcast today to learn how crossvision can help your organization:

• • Synchronize business and IT with maximum transparency and control


• • Manage and govern mission-critical business processes


• • Leverage existing assets by exposing them as reusable business services


• • Compose agile service-based business solutions

Register to view this webinar

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Featured Resources

Entry Points into SOA - Taking a Business Centric Approach
SOA entry points help businesses pursue SOA the right way: by taking a project-based approach. This brochure provides an overview of the Five Key SOA entry points that companies can leverage as an on ramp to SOA.

Download this white paper

SOA Self-Assessment Tool
Improve business results. Your company is demanding it. The market will reward you for it. But do you know where to start? Whether your objective is to improve business strategies, combine business practices and assets, increase efficiency and effectiveness, or to just keep up with regulatory compliance, the new on-line IBM SOA Self Assessment, can help you take stock of where you are and where you would like to go.

Register to access the Self-Assessment Tool

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Featured Resource

Oracle

www.oracle.com

Oracle's business is information - how to manage it, use it, share it, protect it. For nearly three decades, Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL), the world's largest enterprise software company, has provided the software that lets organizations get the most up-to-date and accurate information from their business systems.

Information Connects: Start in the Middle.
Click here for more information.

IDC White Paper: Oracle Builds Comprehensive SOA Platform

Architecting IT Solutions Today to Address Tomorrow's Requirements

The challenge posed in today's complex and volatile business atmosphere is to create an IT environment designed for the unknown, with detailed business policies and rules abstracted from fixed functional and operational capabilities. It is the ability to deliver these abstracted capabilities that underlies the strength of service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Download this white paper to learn how efficiencies in the design, implementation, and operation of SOA-based systems can allow organizations to adapt far more readily to a changing environment.

Download this white paper

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Featured Resource

SOA Governance
This Whitepaper examines the considerations involved in implementing a SOA governance framework at both design time and runtime and the role of runtime policy definition, enforcement and validation products from Layer 7 Technologies.

Register to download this White Paper

Policy Driven SOA
Architecting and implementing secure and flexible Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) requires an ability to mediate interactions between services based on a declarative and remediable policy language. Coding interaction policies between services results in brittle SOA infrastructures that can't accommodate changing security and business needs. In this talk given by Layer 7 CTO Dr. Toufic Boubez, you will hear how a Policy control infrastructure for SOA can be used to engineer loosely-coupled SOA architectures that can span security domains.

Register to download this Podcast

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Featured Resource

A New Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Maturity Model
How can organizations understand SOA and manage the migration to SOA? The New SOA Maturity Model provides a visionary framework that aligns IT action with business benefit. Read this paper to assess your organization's SOA readiness.

Register to download this White Paper

GOLD SPONSOR

Featured Resource

ActiveGrid Enterprise LAMP: Rapidly Build and Flexibly Deploy Service-Oriented Applications
Your end-users want rich, interactive, customized applications. All seamlessly integrated with your existing systems. And on top of your mounting backlog of requests.

Fortunately, help is on the way. ActiveGrid, the Enterprise LAMP company, provides a service-oriented application platform built on the lightweight architecture of the proven LAMP software infrastructure stack. Learn how it simplifies and speeds the development of service-oriented applications that weave together existing enterprise systems into new rich web applications and services >>

Download this White Paper

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Featured Resource

SOA Infrastructure White Paper
In experience gained by planning and implementing SOA Infrastructure solutions at some of the world's largest companies, we have found that there is often misunderstanding surrounding the meaning and requirements for sound SOA Infrastructure. SOA Infrastructure is the collection of architectural, policy, and security related practices and products required to deploy and govern an SOA. This paper addresses the requirements and best practices for developing an effective SOA Infrastructure.

Download this White Paper

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Featured Resource

SOA Leaders
www.soaleaders.org

The SOA Leaders Council is a unique community of service-oriented architecture visionaries. IT executives share their experiences and expertise designing and implementing SOAs to both enrich and learn from their peers. Community members participate in regular in-person local meetings and benefit from hearing first-hand accounts of how others have addressed issues, deployed technology and generated business results. SOA Leaders has chapters throughout the US and in Europe. We welcome new members - please join us.

SOA Leaders Benefactors AmberPoint - www.amberpoint.com
Parasoft - www.parasoft.com
Reactivity - www.reactivity.com
Systinet Corporation - www.systinet.com
ThoughtWorks - www.thoughtworks.com/us