WSO2 is an open source middleware company founded by pioneers in Web services and of members of the Apache Software Foundation Web services community. WSO2 delivers a new, entirely open source middleware stack that is optimized for Web services and SOA and built on Apache Axis2. WSO2's first products are the WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) and WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which are built on the WSO2 Web Services Framework. The company maintains operations in the United States, United Kingdom and Sri Lanka.

SOA is mostly associated with technologies such as BPEL, SCA and Web Services. But does SOA really imply these technologies? In this session we will show how you can use the service oriented approach while staying inside the Java world. jBPM is a powerful lightweight framework that can be used to orchestrate services in the broadest sense. It is highly extendable, very versatile and can be easily embedded in client and/or server applications. Attendees will learn how jBPM can be used in a pure workflow scenario as well as in a situation involving automated business steps.

Development of service-oriented environments is an evolutionary process for organizations of all sizes. The architecture and design decisions made by system architects and developers will impact manageability and flexibility of service infrastructures. Efficient management of loosely-coupled services requires implementing practices to enable visibility, flexibility and automation of service operations. Questions to be answered in this session: What architectures are common for service deployment and integration? How can services be built for manageablility? Why is operational visibility essential for SOA management? How does SOA Management fit into SOA Governance?

MQSoftware delivers business transaction assurance, business service monitoring, middleware management applications, and enterprise application integration products to help customers align IT operations and investments with their business applications. Working with BEA , BMC Software, HP, IBM, Oracle, and TIBCO Software, MQSoftware solutions provide a complete range of real-time transaction assurance and application services performance and availability management backed by comprehensive reporting and supported with powerful tools built for multiplatform infrastructures enabling precision control of customer service and cost-control.

Layer 7 Technologies is a provider of SOA security and governance infrastructure for next generation service oriented and Web oriented integrations. The SecureSpan family of XML appliances and gateway software addresses the security, performance management and operational governance issues associated with deploying and maintaining production Web services.

IBM announced that businesses are taking advantage of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise to manage software applications and service oriented architecture (SOA) environments with minimal human interaction. The software increases application performance and lowers operational and energy costs required to create, run, and manage applications across an enterprise.

Adoption of federated identity technology has been slower than the hype might indicate, despite the maturity of standards such as SAML 2.0 and Web Services Security. This presentation examines the distinct business and technical identity management issues in both the commercial and user-centric spheres, and important catalysts to drive successful deployment.

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) can deliver tremendous value in flexibility, adaptability and cost savings. But SOA environments are complex by definition, with lots of loosely coupled components and a potentially vast combination of platforms, software, databases, applications and networks. One of the biggest challenges inherent in realizing the benefits of SOA is effectively managing all of these diverse components to ensure the high availability and performance of the applications running in them to meet crucial Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This session will explore Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines and offer practical insights into how CEP can be leveraged to enable rapid real-time problem correction and predictive problem prevention that is vital to successful SOA implementations.

Service orientation is one of the most popular trends of these recent years, but there are not any metrics on it. Hence you can not consume SOA in a project with a specific measuring. On the other side, Unified Process (especially RUP) has powerful abilities on such developments. In our discussion Chris Shayan is going to demonstrate that we can combine SOA and RUP with each other and finally make a Service Oriented Unified Process.

It seems that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) continues to be this year's hot buzzword, rather than a well-defined, meaningful and valuable part of the Enterprise Architecture landscape. Before the term fades away completely, perhaps we should agree what's valuable about the move to SOA and how to make the leap, and make the leap valuable. OMG's SOA Consortium is making great strides in defining SOA to be a valuable business strategy for business agility, taking advantage of Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management and other concepts; and the OMG itself is making headway on modeling standards for services (as opposed to yet another set of standards for moving bits around wires).

What is BPEL? What is XPDL? How are they different? What is the best use for each? What is BPMN, and why should I care? Which of these are primarily designed to help IT at a technical level, and which help an organization at a business level? Amongst the flurry of BPM and Web services standards that appear to overlap at times, there is a central core of important ones. This session, led by Keith Swenson, Fujitsu's Chief Architect and Co-Chair of the Workflow Management Coalition Technical Committee (WfMC), is aimed at lending clarity to the fuzzy world of BPM and Web services standards and at explaining the benefits of investing in standards-driven solutions.

This session will investigate what is happening out there in the world of Mobility that uses Services, some are calling this MOA (Mobile Oriented Architecture). We will also discuss architectures, application design & considerations for mobility

The SOA Consortium announced that Hitachi has joined the SOA Consortium. They are the first Japan-based organization to join. The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. SOA Consortium sponsors include Cisco, HP, IBM , SAP, Savant, Sparx Systems and Sun Microsystems.

Layer 7 Technologies announced its go-to-market partnership with Steria Benelux. Steria will act as a channel partner for Layer 7's SOA gateway products in Belgium to offer leading SOA security, governance solutions and support to its current and prospective customers.

If you've been working with Web Services for a long time, chances are you've worked with Apache Axis and that you have an Axis Web Service somewhere in your code base. You probably also know about the many improvements in Axis2, especially around support for the more modern WS-* standards. So maybe you've been planning on migrating these old Axis services, but it can be hard to justify spending a lot of time on something that's working just fine.

Managed Methods develops and sells versatile and cost-effective solutions products for monitoring Web services and managing service-oriented architectures. Their focus is providing practical tools that enable visibility and management of Web services operations in the production environment. As an organization, Managed Methods offers the following value: IT Operations Monitoring Experience, Focus on Product Flexibility and Value, Customization, Customer-driven and Flexible Licensing.

Boomi and StrikeIron announced a partnership focused on driving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) adoption by enabling seamless integration of StrikeIron's Marketplace Web services into Boomi On Demand. Boomi users can now integrate the full spectrum of business intelligence, CRM, e-commerce and financial solutions that StrikeIron offers with no additional coding required.

'When we speak of enterprise mash-ups, composite applications and software as a service (SaaS), it's easy to forget that you actually need infrastructure behind the user experience to make it happen,' says Gordon Van Huizen in this exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan. SOA middleware is among the fastest growing segments of the software industry, Van Huizen notes, adding: 'I believe that the increased interest in Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications will drive the growth of middleware faster than EAI did.'

I've worked for Fortune 500 companies engaged simultaneously in 50+ of IT projects as well as small companies with one or two products and I don't believe there is a need for any organization to have a full-time software architect. Once the modeling is done, it is the work of coding and testing that truly takes the full-time effort. Once underway, 100 hours a month of time is enough for any architect to respond to most needs of all ongoing projects.

Peer networks are really just logical graphs of computers, or, in many cases, logical graphs of connected applications. The physical topology of the peer network, means of communication, and weighting of the edges are all implementation-specific details that differ from P2P network to P2P network, but all of them can be reduced down at some point to a drawing containing nodes and edges.

But that same virtualization is perhaps even more valuable in the performance lab, if you can apply serious load testing to it. The constraints of having a realistic environment and test data to test and develop against is holding these teams back from finding performance issues much earlier - so we can gauge SLAs (service levels) at the component level. And in SOA - where you are dealing with services and underlying systems that are distributed and constantly changing, replicating that whole environment is incredibly costly and time consuming.

The SOA Consortium and CIO magazine have announced the expert panel of judges who will be reviewing entries to the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Case Study Contest. The contest is open to organizations of all sizes, including government agencies that have successfully delivered business or mission value using an SOA approach.

Adopting SOA is a lot like gardening. It takes time, skill, a lot of hard work, and the process can be messy and even a bit frustrating at times. I know you've probably heard tons of different analogies that attempt to put SOA and governance into everyday terms and I'm sure that growing the SOA 'garden' through governance won't be the last.

It's what you don't see about the emerging Web that has everyone excited these days. Namely, it's the powerful application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs are nothing new and have been traditionally cryptic and difficult to use. However, the advent of Web services along with the notion of mashups has changed the way we consider and leverage APIs going forward.

IBM announced that it is collaborating with nine business partners to help healthcare providers, clinics and hospitals improve productivity, increase quality and reduce costs through the use of service oriented architecture (SOA). These partners are all working to develop their latest healthcare applications using the IBM SOA Foundation and supporting a set of open technology and industry standards.

Software AG announced that SaskTel has implemented the webMethods Suite to streamline the integration, management and optimization of core business processes. Serving more than 425,000 business and residential customers, SaskTel is a full service communications provider in Saskatchewan, Canada. As part of its transformation into a next-generation provider, the webMethods Suite will be used by SaskTel to reduce operational costs, enhance customer service, improve the business?s responsiveness to change, and to facilitate the more rapid deployment of new products and services.

IONA announced the latest release of Artix Data Services, an open and standards-based development tool for building model-driven data services, and a key component of IONA's Artix advanced SOA infrastructure suite. Artix Data Services shortens the data services development, test and maintenance lifecycle and improves the quality of data as it flows across heterogeneous environments.

In an effort to buy itself time to head off corporate raider Carl Icahn's mission to nominate a slate of completely new directors for the search giant, Yahoo has made an SEC filing saying that its July 3 AGM is postponed till the end of July. One of its current ten directors, Edward Kozel, also resigned from the board and will not be replaced.

The success of SOA runs two ways. SOA serves as the catalyst for organizational change, yet an organization must be ready to embrace these new dimensions opened up by SOA. The latest survey data shows most organizations are just starting on their SOA journeys. Why do enterprises set out to build a Service Oriented Architecture, but end up with a 'Service Averse Architecture'? There are many promises being made about the potential of SOA these days, followed by disillusionment as these promises don't pan out. However, SOA is more than a single IT project or even a series of implementations. Rather, SOA represents a long-term change in thinking and management of all aspects of the enterprise. SOA not only decomposes technology into loosely coupled systems, but also decomposes organizations into 'loosely coupled businesses.' This session will look at the latest survey data on ways organizations are embracing service oriented architecture, and how far along the road most are from full-functioning SOA.

IONA announced that it has become a Silver Sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to consensus-based, collaborative software development. Financial sponsorship will help ASF to acquire servers and hardware infrastructure, purchase bandwidth and needed resources, and increase awareness of ASF projects and incubating initiatives.

Service orientation is one of the most popular trends of these recent years, but there are not any metrics on it. Hence you can not consume SOA in a project with a specific measuring. On the other side, Unified Process (especially RUP) has powerful abilities on such developments. In our discussion Chris Shayan is going to demonstrate that we can combine SOA and RUP with each other and finally make a Service Oriented Unified Process.

Enterprise IT's 'Moment of Truth' has arrived, according to Sandy Zylka, a co-founder of NextAxiom and the co-inventor of the company's seven patent-pending innovations. Zylka, who participates in consulting services to NextAxiom customers as a Principal SOA Architect, unveils in this interview with SOAWorld Magazine NextAxiom's concept of its platform as being akin to 'Next-Generation Middleware on Tap.'

What is BPEL? What is XPDL? How are they different? What is the best use for each? What is BPMN, and why should I care? Which of these are primarily designed to help IT at a technical level, and which help an organization at a business level? Amongst the flurry of BPM and Web services standards that appear to overlap at times, there is a central core of important ones. This session, led by Keith Swenson, Fujitsu's Chief Architect and Co-Chair of the Workflow Management Coalition Technical Committee (WfMC), is aimed at lending clarity to the fuzzy world of BPM and Web services standards and at explaining the benefits of investing in standards-driven solutions.

SOA has come a long way from a concept to wide-scale adoption by the enterprise at multiple layers of IT. SOA implementation at the UI layer is the latest in SOA adoption trends. SOA has manifested itself in a number of flavors such as the creation of a rich user experience by using technology like AJAX, provisioning value-added services by mashing up data from multiple sources, community-based peer-to-peer interactions, creating collective intelligence, creating collaborative platforms often catering to a trusted community, and creating modular content-based sites.

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.

Spending time with my parents over the holidays got me thinking about the differences between this generation and the previous one. My parents expect to spend a certain amount of time and effort managing certain aspects of their lives. For example, when they drive to an unfamiliar vacation spot, they inquire about directions and even write or plot the route before they head out. Whereas for me, it is a matter of popping out an iPhone or a GPS device, saving time, improving accuracy, and avoiding the mistakes of manually drafting the directions.

There is uniform agreement that SOA holds great promise as a strategy for improving business agility, better aligning IT and the business, and increasing overall IT efficiency. Developing an SOA strategy has become a key issue for most large enterprises: CTOs in a 2007 McKinsey survey ranked SOA as their top strategic item.

TopQuadrant has announced the general availability of TopBraid Live 2.0, a semantic application deployment platform that simplifies the creation of web services to a 'click and connect' process. Users can connect data from RDF stores, relational databases, spreadsheets, email, RSS feeds, as well as data in HTML and XML formats, without the need to understand programming languages. A new Flex API creates graphical 'information spaces' as the output, which allow users to browse dynamic information by following graphical links.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of 'Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) Infrastructure Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, 2008 to 2014' to their offering. According to the report, IBM is the de-facto industry standard market leader in SOA. IBM dominates SOA with 64% of the market, the rest of market is divided between 12 other participants with measurable market share, none of whom have even been able to garner as much as 8% of the market.

SOA Software announced that it has acquired LogicLibrary, a SOA Repository and Governance vendor. This acquisition combines two recognized companies, creating a dominant SOA Governance company with an impressive customer base. SOA Software is positioned by Gartner in the leader's quadrant of the 'Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets, 2007' report. The Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets evaluated 18 vendors and summarizes the state of the market for SOA Governance. The company focuses on SOA Policy Governance and SOA Operational Governance with strong registry, policy management, and service management capabilities.