Stories about: Actional

The SOA concept -- developing a software architecture based on service components that can be mixed and matched as needed to reduce development time and increase application deployment flexibility -- is only a few years old, but the providers of SOA-supporting infrastructure are fast consolidating. Oracle captured the headlines with its acquisition of BEA Systems this spring, and Progress Software recently bought Iona Technologies.

Progress Software is launching its Progress Actional 7.1 SOA management platform Monday, featuring visibility across business processes and into related services and IT infrastructure.

The most well-rounded business process management system (BPMS) we've tested to date, Lombardi Software's Teamworks combines an execution and events monitoring engine with a close-knit IDE and tools for modeling and simulation analysis. With the inclusion of human-centric, collaborative workflow and services-based integration hooks, Teamworks can deliver near-seamless mapping, testing, and deployment to execute most any enterprise workflow. Where Teamworks truly stands out from other players is its well-integrated performance server, which draws on a unified tracking data store for both real-time process optimization and historical playback in design phase analysis, where testing for optimal flow and efficiency can be challenging.

The concept of an SOA "suite" may seem antithetical to those who were counting on SOA to free us from the tyranny of vendor lock-in, but there's an upside to this development. First, today's ESB (enterprise service bus) suites are much more capable than the early point solutions. Second, when you're dropping six figures on a paradigm shift, you want to know someone has your back at every layer of the services stack.

Service-oriented architecture promises many positives: resource reuse, application integration, business agility and infrastructure flexibility, among others. But never do SOA proponents claim ease of management as one of the technology's glories.

SOA (service-oriented architecture) promises enterprises endless advantages: increased code reuse, reduced integration expense, better security, and -- the big payoff -- greater business agility. Whether you achieve those benefits, however, probably has more to do with your policies and procedures than the quality of your code.

As companies migrate to New Data Center architectures, it stands to reason that they'll look at a wide range of vendors with new tools to help. Here are seven promising products.

Service oriented architectures continue to capture attention; at the same time their complexities need managing.

SOA tools are being unveiled this week by SOA Software, Systinet, and Mindreef, including SOA Software's tool to manage many enterprise service buses (ESB) in a single environment.

Sonic Software last week brought out a new version of its Actional service-oriented architecture (SOA) management tool that it said will provide business users with more visibility into business processes.

Enterprise service bus is the most promising new middleware approach. ESB generally refers to integration software that supports simple, expedited, loosely coupled, standards-based, service-oriented integration. It also refers to a segment of the middleware market that converges the best features of message-oriented middleware, integration brokers and Web services.