SOA Software announced that its Service Oriented Legacy Architecture (SOLA) product, the industry's first high-performance, secure, standards-based platform for CICS Web services is now shipping.

Already deployed in production at Merrill Lynch for more than three years, the first commercially available release of SOLA, version 5.0, adds comprehensive support for key messaging and infrastructure standards including WS-Security, WS-Policy, XML-Signature and XML-Encryption.  SOLA can be deployed standalone, or with the SOA Software Service Manager product as part of a comprehensive SOA Infrastructure.

SOA Software's SOLA solves one of today's most pressing problems – integrating new distributed applications with legacy mainframe applications. It provides customers with a fast, easy, reliable and secure way to expose mainframe applications as Web services, and allows mainframe applications to consume Web services. SOLA runs as a set of mainframe applications to capitalize on the reliability and performance offered by this platform to deliver Web services with minimal overhead and low, fixed costs.

"The commercial availability of SOLA ensures that every company with a large CICS environment can now realize the same benefits that Merrill Lynch has seen since we created this platform," said Jim Crew, vice president of SOLA at SOA Software.  "SOLA is the only CICS product proven to handle the scale, performance and functionality requirements of Merrill Lynch's demanding environment."

SOLA enables mainframes to expose and consume Web services. It is a unique single solution that bridges the gap between databases and applications on the mainframe and the distributed world, leveraging decades of investment. SOLA accomplishes this without any additional hardware, software, middleware, coding or cross-platform skills training.

SOLA's toolset reduces application development cost and time to market. Most importantly, this is a proven product, as it is used successfully in extensive production roll out today at Merrill Lynch processing more than 2,000,000 transactions daily.

SOLA offers unique value to SOA Software's customer for many reasons, including:

•  An enterprise ready, standards-based, mainframe Web services platform with performance and scalability proven in production at Merrill Lynch
• Easy to use, fully integrated, user centric mainframe Web services development environment
• Cost effective platform requires no additional hardware or software for Web services run-time

SOLA key features include: