ZapThink, LLC announced the industry’s first EA validation, verification, and mentorship services offering, providing a comprehensive, customer-tested methodology and defined deliverables to assess, validate, and verify existing EA and SOA initiatives.  Unlike typical SOA consulting offerings, ZapMentorship offers EA practitioners a valuable set of tools, metrics, templates, and advisory that lowers the risk of SOA initiatives for practitioners that are on the hook to provide SOA solutions to meet the strategic requirements of the organization.     

“From our over 30 years of combined experience in SOA and EA, ZapThink has proven experience in providing customers practical guidance for solving critical agility and change management problems by leveraging SOA best practices,” says Ronald Schmelzer, Managing Partner at ZapThink.  “ZapThink helps these customers put SOA into practice in a rational, well-paced, and best practices-driven manner that helps to validate projects and recover SOA initiatives that may be heading down the wrong path.”

ZapMentorship provides hands-on guidance, knowledge transfer, and advisory that aims to help customers adopt best practices and methodologies for ensuring SOA success. The ZapMentorship offerings include:

• ZapAdvisory
• ZapValue
• ZapAssurance
• ZapMethods
• ZapValidation

In addition to ZapMentorship, ZapThink announced a special  One Day Quick Assessment that accelerates the pace of SOA adoption and progress. For $3595, ZapThink offers customers the opportunity to spend a day with a Master Architect (including David Linthicum and Jason Bloomberg,) at the customer’s site focused on providing a checklist-driven methodology to quickly assess an organization’s architectural, technological, organizational, governance, and infrastructural capabilities for SOA and potential next steps.

“Enterprises desperately want to be on the right track with SOA and need external help and guidance,” says David Linthicum, Managing Partner at ZapThink and head of SOA Mentorship offerings at ZapThink.   “However, the rapid growth of the SOA marketplace is making it difficult for end users to separate vendors and consulting firms with high value offerings from those who simply market their efforts as being Service-oriented without the credibility or capabilities to deliver. As such, end users turn to ZapThink for guidance in matching the capabilities they have for delivering architectural offerings with the emerging best practices they require to ensure a high degree of architectural success.”