Not all services are created equal. It would be great if implementing SOA were simply a matter of applying a standard design pattern to all services. Once IT had identified and codified an optimal design standard, services could be stamped out in assembly-line fashion until the IT landscape had been transformed. Unfortunately, we don't live in a cookie-cutter service Utopia.

Managed Methods has announced the availability of their Web Service management portal JaxView 4.0. While providing full support for the SOA and Web service management for the IT operations, JaxView 4.0 offers expanded features with the Agentless Web services management and SOA visibility functionality.

After a $1.5 million angel round, Desktone, which was started in 2006 by Eric Pulier, who also started SOA Software, US Interactive and IVT, picked up $17 million in first-round funding about a year ago from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Citrix Systems and the China-based Tangee International. SoftBank as well as Deutsche Telekom could become service providers. Ruda says the brains behind the technology is Paul Gaffney, the former CIO of Staples. The company has maybe 40 people, more than half of them in Shanghai doing development, which explains Tangee's involvement.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

Today's identity management systems help organizations gain control over identity information in the enterprise, however, these systems are silos - and despite industry standards, there is very little interoperability. The Bandit project provides open-source identity services that reduce the challenges of identity silos to provide a consistent approach to identity management for users and administrators, regardless of underlying systems. To continue this evolution in open-source, Bandit has partnered with the Higgins project to deliver an open-source identity system that is interoperable with Windows CardSpace. This session will demo this development milestone and explain its significance in the identity community.

Disaster Recovery 2.0 (DR 2.0), incorporates new technologies that will help organizations better prepare for a disaster, at a lower-price point. One of the main aspects of implementing a solid DR plan is adding virtualization capabilities. Virtualization is already a mainstream tool for many IT administrators to consolidate applications within their data center. In the near future, virtualization will live up to its hype - not only will it enable high availability within servers, but also desktop virtualization, which can lead the way to more use of thin client PCs. This session's speaker will discuss DR 2.0 and how virtualization acts as a key enabler.

While enterprise open source vendors continue to debate the definition of 'open,' customers are listening. Not because they care as much about what open source business model a particular vendor uses but because our debates give them reason to be confused and to consider the FUD that is pushed into the marketplace. The Open Solutions Alliance is a nonprofit vendor neutral organization that exists for one purpose: to address CIOs most pressing issue today - interoperability among open solutions. While the customers have been listening to us, the OSA has been listening very intently to them. This session will discuss what CIOs are looking for in open solutions vendors and how they expect it to be delivered based on real discussions and work sessions.

With the immediate need for exposing Web services from portals and Web applications, the various RIA (Rich Internet Application) development environments are proving to be rapid enablers. This session takes a look at AJAX techniques and Microsoft ASP.NET SharePoint Webparts that facilitate SOA enablement, and addresses key related issues - including security - that are inherently involved in these approaches.

We've come pretty far with SOA. Gartner reports that 'SOA' is the most widely used search term on their Website. On Google, a search for 'SOA' turns up 6,750,000 matches. And all of us in IT probably have to wade through some discussion related to SOA on a daily basis. That's a pretty impressive level of awareness and mind share.

M&S Consulting is a technology and strategy consulting firm that delivers enterprise process and technology solutions for mission critical objectives. As adopters of other Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings including Application Server, Portal, BI, and SOA Suite (BPEL/ESB/BAM), M&S Consulting has also embraced Oracle's new Fusion Middleware offering called ?Oracle WebCenter?. In this review, we take a closer look at the recently announced Oracle WebCenter Suite. We checked out the capabilities that are included in the current release and mapped them to a set of requirements that are common among the majority of our customers.

IBS has gone live with its first Windows version of its IBS Enterprise application. The installation for the property company, Varbergs Bostads AB, was implemented according to plan and the application has exhibited high performance under large transaction volumes. During 2008, IBS will commence launching IBS Enterprise applications in multi-platform versions.

Ultimus announced that it has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Human-Centric BPM for Microsoft Platforms, Q4 2007, Forrester Research, Inc., December 2007. Positioned as a leader, the company was one of a select group of vendors asked to participate in the evaluation.

HP and Oracle, in collaboration with Intel, announced that their Application Modernization Initiative is gaining momentum as customers increasingly migrate away from legacy systems to drive business growth with more reliable and efficient IT infrastructures.

SAP AG announced growth in its ecosystem across India, which is the location for the final event in the SAP® TechEd '07 series. Indian customers and partners have more than doubled their membership and activities within SAP communities of innovation, showing India as a driving force in the SAP ecosystem. In Bangalore, SAP will welcome more than 5,000 customers and partners to discuss how to better harness the power and flexibility of enterprise SOA to transform existing business processes. The announcement was made at SAP TechEd '07 Bangalore, being held in Bangalore, India from November 28-30.

Juniper Networks, Inc. announced that the company?s application acceleration platforms have achieved SAP Certified Integration. The certified integration affirms that enterprises deploying services and applications using an enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) can achieve improved performance optimization, security and access reliability when integrating the Juniper Networks DX 5.3 load balancing and application acceleration platform in data centers, and improved performance optimization when integrating the Juniper Networks WX 5.5 application acceleration platform into their SAP solution-based WAN environments.

Parasoft Corporation announced in a recent independent comparison review, InfoWorld found Parasoft SOAtest to be the best overall solutions after reviewing five different testing solutions used for SOA testing. Parasoft SOAtest is a comprehensive, collaborative test and analysis solution suite designed specifically for test and validation of Service Oriented Architectures.

Open source has made significant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

This is happening right now in many organizations and it extends beyond the introduction of collaboration technologies, such as wikis and blogs, to the next level of workplace interactions. Business - New software products will allow information workers to freely mix application data with publicly available Web content, in a variety of convenient formats. People - Employees, led by a new wave of Generation Y-ers entering the workforce, will forever change the way people interact with enterprise applications and information systems. Technology - Popular Web 2.0 data delivery and sharing technologies, like RSS/ATOM, AJAX, personalized homepages, tagging and social bookmarking, are open and inherently insecure.

In this session we'll talk about the notion of the Universal SOA, and how to prepare your SOA to see the outside world, and the emerging Web. It's clear that many of the services we consume and manage going forward will be services that exist outside of the enterprise, such as subscription services from guys like Salesforce.com, or perhaps emerging Web services marketplaces. This is 'outside-in' SOA, in essence reusing service in an enterprise not created by that enterprise, much as we do today with information on the Web. Thus, those services outside of the enterprise existing on the Internet create a 'Universal SOA' - ready to connect to your enterprise SOA, perhaps providing more value. This is nothing new, by the way; we've been talking Universal SOA for some time now, at least the notion, and we are just seeing bits and pieces appearing today.

The original goal of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) concept was to build flexible, loosely coupled systems. That meant removing or lessening the runtime dependencies between components or endpoints. One of the best, if overused, examples of loosely coupled systems is the way the Web works today. Routing, DNS, cookies, SSL handshakes, authentication, redirection, etc., are all handled by the infrastructure at runtime. Only a URL is typically required. In order to achieve this in the SOA world, contracts, requirements, and capabilities need to be defined and automated through a declarative and manageable mechanism. WSDL is far from being adequate as a complete contract language for SOA. The required level of abstraction for SOA sits at the policy level. Policies contain assertions about the operational interfaces for components in an SOA. These include credential preferences, authentication and authorization mechanisms, signature and encryption preferences, identity sources, routing, transformations, versioning, reliable messaging, and others. This talk will introduce the concept of Policy-Driven SOA and discuss Policy and the WS-Policy specification as the new contract abstraction for SOA.

The momentum behind service-oriented systems is intense and the hype machine is in full swing. Consequently, it is tempting to believe that if you slap a SOAP/REST/JSON/etc., wrapper around all your enterprise systems, you will be able to cash in on the service-oriented ROI. The fact is, there are right ways and wrong ways to design a SOA. In this session, you will learn about SOA patterns for system integration, message brokering, and data management to name of few. SOA Quality of Service (QoS) and the top five SOA anti-patterns will also be discussed.

SOA is becoming the prevailing choice for IT enterprises and the success of this transition to an SOA is based on quality of the SOA governance solution. This session will highlight why SOA governance is crucial for the successful transition to SOA. It will also discuss how to build policy enforcement contracts that can customize how service consumers and producers are able interact with existing enterprise services. The session will explore how enterprise architects and developers can build and leverage an SOA governance strategy in order to manage, share, and enforce policies around the key service artifacts across the enterprise. It will show how to effectively manage the design, execution, and management aspects of the governance infrastructure. Michael will focus on tips, best practices, and strategies on how to develop policy enforcement contracts that can be decorated across internal or external services in the enterprise enhancing the value of the SOA.

The Reference Model for SOA is an OASIS standard. It provides a vocabulary for service-oriented applications that allows people to achieve a common understanding when they talk about services. This talk will explain how to use the reference model in discussions with vendors, stakeholders, development staff, business analysts, and others who participate in the development of services. This will permit everyone to speak the same language when planning, architecting, developing, and using a SOA.

In this session Frank Cohen will introduce the technologies that go into a SOA development stack, including composite applications, application servers, ESBs, Master Data Management, registry/epository, XML parsers, Workflow engines, databases, and protocols. Called the Base Computing Stack, Frank teaches about the stack and the scalability, performance, and developer productivity problems in this environment.

According to Gartner, 80 percent of data transfer is done via FTP. A time-consuming and unreliable process born from the mainframe, FTP regularly impacts e-commerce and supply chain orders and processes, unnecessarily disrupting business and jeopardizing revenue. ESB alleviates the latency of batch data processing, eliminates data transfer inefficiencies, and is reliable even in the 'chattiest' networks. There will also be discussion of how enterprises can best leverage the benefits of ESB within their SOA strategy.

As companies embrace SOA and begin breaking apart monolithic applications, the question of how to control and secure access becomes mission critical. How do you take advantage of the flexibility inherent in a SOA while ensuring that component services are properly secured and managed through established access control policies? By decoupling the access control logic from the component services and administering it centrally, tomorrow's enterprise will be both agile and secured. This session will introduce the concept of entitlement management and demonstrate why emerging standards such as XACML are crucial to administering and enforcing policies in a SOA.

Two trends in applications architecture - AJAX RIA on the client side and service-orientation on the server side - are enabling powerful enterprise solutions that can be leveraged in diverse business environments. In this session, Michael Peachy will use real-world case studies to demonstrate how organizations are taking advantage of both of these advancements in application architecture to provide AJAX rich Internet applications that double the applicability of SOA investments. Attendees will hear how to deliver feature rich, high-productivity end-user applications to the business desktop.

The integration approaches of today's content management systems, where solutions are individually programmed against each of the proprietary APIs, cannot scale and the Enterprise Content management (ECM) industry is answering that call through the development of standardized programming interfaces for ECM systems. In this session, attendees will review the resulting initiative to produce a Web services-based standard for ECM and develop a better understanding of both existing and developing standards including XML, BPEL, JCR (JSR-170), XForms, and XML Schema. Attendees will also analyze and discern the suitability of each standard to various deployment architectures and problem domains.

The landscape of Web Services, and the shape of the SOA Infrastructure is changing. Widespread adoption of SOA concepts has gripped the attention of IT organizations worldwide, causing most to charge headfirst into strategic architecture and planning efforts that will have their long reaching effects into the next few decades. Different standards, new technology, and performance and security requirements all have an influence on the outcome of these initiatives. This session will identify the current trends, capabilities and limitations of implementing an SOA, along with the best and worst practices learned from early adopters.

To deliver quality SOA applications, enterprises need to focus their efforts on complete, collaborative, and continuous testing. The continuous aspect of testing is of specific importance due to the perpetual changes that occur as services evolve. Continuous testing is essential not only because bugs are particularly costly and time-consuming to fix when they appear later in the development process, but also because it reduces misunderstandings between interdependent service providers. Continuous testing is imperative to meet the growing needs of life-cycle governance, ensuring that policy, performance, and quality expectations are being met for SOA.

This session will dive straight into the middle of a real-world open source SOA implementations, showing how all the facets of how the SOA Big Rules are attained within the solution. This will cover an in-depth walkthrough, by example and demos, of: How to implement large XML Schema-driven document/literal Web services using partly Java EE 5 and partly J2EE 1.4; How security is enabled through certificate-based authentication with WS-Security; How the services are orchestrated with WS-BPEL; and how JSR-168 portlets leverage the end-user experience and how these are exposed using WSRP. The solution is based strictly on open source software and a guide for picking the right frameworks and the right products in the myriad of these will be addressed as well. Prerequisites: Knowledge of Java technology, IDEs, XML, and an interest in SOA.

There is much talk about policy and governance and in many organizations, governance by fiat is the norm. Some end users refer to it as 'management by showing the door,' or 'my way or the highway' management. As SOA expands beyond the scope of IT and into business federations, life-cycle groups and into business processes, a profound shift in emphasis happens. Despite the need for 'Control' asserted by central IT organizations, the nature of the 'Service Delivery Contract' or enforceable agreement can be used as a template to drive bilateral or multi-party SOA. Learn how federating policy can be seen as the process of identifying, documenting, enforcing, and auditing the value of integrity of agreements and relationships. This less coercive model of governance not only accelerates adoption, but decreases the risk of resistance and infighting that dooms many SOA projects.

This presentation will demonstrate a fully integrated and secured service-oriented architecture (SOA) using WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere ESB, WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere MQ, Workplace Forms, WebSphere Portal and Tivoli Access Manager - all integrated together. We will explain the various technical challenges, integration points, and implementation details of the project. Our 'Consumer Bank Account Opening Framework,' a real-world application for financial organizations, will be showcased; this includes complex forms processing, workflow, and human tasks. This session is designed to not only expand your technical knowledge of key emerging technologies but you will also learn how to leverage these technologies for industry.

We expect a lot from SOA. We want business agility to support growth, attention to customers and efficient, collaborative operations. But you can't expect what you don't inspect. Composite applications that are constantly changing call for a new testing paradigm to assure that business processes will work as expected over the complex, heterogeneous environments of multiple protocols and transports. We need visibility across ESBs, across the application life cycle and across the producer-consumer community. Agility demands automation for speed and reusability. It also requires testing functions unique to integration - which is why this is a new investment for most organizations. The risk of not becoming more agile for business results is part of the drive to make quality assurance key in any SOA initiative. Hear real-world examples of what automated end-to-end testing delivers today to several Fortune 500 companies.

'Services' are everywhere, from internally focused SOAs to public services from Federal Express, eBay, Amazon and Google. But there's no 'User' in 'SOA'. And delivering services to business users can get harder when enterprise application requirements for security and availability are added to the requirements list. AJAX (and Web 2.0 in general) represents a vast improvement of client applications in terms of usability. AJAX is the future of rich enterprise application development. Developers have the opportunity to deliver new, advanced methods for data manipulation and visualization. Most important, AJAX complements the loosely coupled nature of Services perfectly. AJAX can make the perfect delivery medium for services to business users, but this synergy requires a proper architecture. JackBe's unique combination of AJAX and SOA expertise will help attendees understand the needs and solutions to create truly Enterprise AJAX solutions using AJAX and SOA.

Java expert Mark Hansen provides a practical introduction to using Java Web services and AJAX to implement SOA. Mark covers creating, deploying, and invoking Web services that can be composed into loosely coupled SOA applications. He begins by reviewing the 'big picture,' including the challenges of Java-based SOA development. Next, he introduces the latest Java EE 5 Web services APIs and discusses how they work with AJAX. He concludes by showing how AJAX and Java Web services can be used to integrate Yahoo Shopping, eBay, and Amazon to create a universal shopping application.

The confluence of several mature architectural paradigms with new user-centric paradigms will drive the next generation of IT. Next-generation IT will be based on the combination of model-driven architecture and service-oriented architecture applied to applications, information delivery, and IT resources alike. The agility gained in IT infrastructure coupled with highly configurable, lightweight, 'last mile' visualization technologies will dramatically increase the relevance and reactivity of IT to the business.

Complex Event Processing software provides the foundation for making an SOA event-driven. CEP software in an SOA environment offers re-usable processing and analysis services that are available for all applications to leverage. This approach de-couples event processing logic from the business applications enabling faster application development. Centralized, dynamic management of the event processing logic in the CEP repository and service enables rapid change without disruption to the business applications. This presentation will examine how complex event processing applies to an SOA environment. Also presenting will be Sallie Mae, a multi-billion dollar financial services firm, who is using CEP to event-enable their entire suite of service-oriented customer management applications.

British Telecom Openreach Portal is one of new breed open-source portal platforms that have embraced new and futuristic technologies to provide an unparalleled service to end customers. BT Openreach Portal provides the facility for UK-based communication providers (CPs) to manage and service their end customer orders ranging from a simple phone connection and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) to fiber-based private circuits. Being largely a B2B portal, it provided Openreach standardized, silo-based services to the CPs. This provided too rigid a framework for the CPs to manage and access their orders as well as carry out the required order journeys and did not provide a CP-oriented view of data and execution. Further, the rigid deployment architecture hindered the CPs from personalizing their order journeys as well as prevented BT from deploying new or customized services. In this session we will examine how the SOA and Web 2.0 technology-based platform developed in Openreach Portal by wiring up the existing rigid flows and deploying them for execution, through Web and Web service interfaces in real-time and zero down time, gave the power to end users to define their own services and flows.

Apache Tuscany provides an open source services infrastructure for building SOA. It's based on the widely supported Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification. With the Tuscany implementation of SCA, application developers can easily create or reuse services in different languages (BPEL, Java or various scripting languages) and assemble and deploy them in a distributed environment. This session will introduce SCA and explain how this open source implementation of SCA will simplify the building of SOA solutions.