BEA Systems, IBM Corporation, IONA Technologies, Oracle, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Sybase, Xcalia and Zend Technologies have announced an effort to develop specifications and resulting collaborative technologies that simplify how organizations create and implement applications in a Service Oriented Architecture.

Using the SOA Programming Model specifications, organizations can more easily create new and transform existing IT assets into reusable services that may be rapidly adapted to meet changing business requirements. Further, the specifications greatly reduce complexity associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify services regardless of programming language and deployment platform.

The specifications take advantage of the emerging trend Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which structures IT assets as a series of reusable services that perform business functions. By structuring applications as a series of services, IT assets become more agile and organizations are better able to align their investments in dynamic business environments.

For example, using the specifications a mortgage lender can significantly reduce the complexity of automating the loan approval process by developing a set of interconnected "services" based on existing applications tying data on new home owners including credit reports to processes for ordering home appraisals and rate locking. As a result, the lender services more customers while providing more value. In addition, by adopting these specifications organizations gain a higher degree of investment protection, because they can deploy services with a variety of middleware technologies.

The SOA Programming Model specifications include the Service Component Architecture (SCA) to simplify the development of creating business services and Service Data Objects (SDO) for accessing data residing in multiple locations and formats.

SCA provides an open, technology neutral model for implementing IT services that are defined in terms of a business function and make middleware functions more accessible to the application developer. SCA also provides a model for the assembly of business solutions from collections of individual services, with control over aspects of the solution such as access methods and security. Vendors working to create SCA include BEA Systems, IBM, IONA, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, Sybase and Zend Technologies.