Key features of MooD SOA

Key features of MooD SOA
Highly intuitive and visually compelling environment that lets you test and execute how the SOA applications will work
The Orchestration Engine allows you to dramatically accelerate the specification and testing of services against a business-level architecture in a transparent and simple manner
The user configurable language (DSL technology) accommodates the things that you decide are important to making SOA deliver - a common framework for collaborative development
The liv.e relationship model ensures that elements are connected - impact is managed and changes remain in dynamic alignment as the strategy evolves
Provides the components for developing performance monitoring solutions
Bi-directional integration with underlying SOA platforms such as IBM’s WebSphere and Oracle Fusion
MooD SOA is the answer to...
"How do I keep the business process and service design in line with the technical implementation?"
"How do I get ready, introduce and evolve my SOA plan?"
"How do I really achieve the promised value of SOA?"
"How do I design and acquire the right set of services?"
"How do I then make SOA have an incremental impact on my business operations?"
Join the MooD SOA Community
The architecture community is interested in sharing information about the opportunities for SOA in the business and technical environments, the techniques and best practice that has proved successful, and in fact any discussion topic that is relevant around the SOA subject. It is aimed at supporting use and interaction with colleagues in this field.
Take the SOA Readiness Assessment
In addition to our consultancy based assessment, we have a simplified, online SOA readiness and maturity assessment that will identify the areas that are important for you in making SOA work more effectively.
Source: http://www.soa-technology.com/

SOA-cloud combination can bring benefits

Cloud computing may have overtaken SOA as the trendy technology term of the day, but the two concepts can be paired to bolster service deployments, industry experts say. With cloud computing, enterprises can access services hosted on third party servers over the internet. In SOA, enterprises use integrated application services in a more lightweight fashion than traditional application platforms.

Recently, analyst Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group wrote a controversial "obituary" for SOA, panning the acronym, while still endorsing the need for service-oriented architecture. SOA, she said, was survived by "offspring," including cloud computing, BPM, mashups and SaaS.

"Certainly, the SOA conversation is starting to shift to the cloud," says Steven Martin, senior director for developer platform technology at Microsoft. "The cloud is a logical hosting environment for services," he says. "Service orientation is a way to build applications, whereas 'cloud' refers to the infrastructure as well as the delivery model for that application."

"SOA is an architectural style for building applications, loosely coupled, allowing composition," says Jerry Cuomo, CTO of IBM's WebSphere business. "Can we build a datacentre infrastructure on SOA principles? Yes, and that's the cloud, so it's a service-oriented infrastructure," he adds. "It's taking that architectural principle of SOA and applying it to an infrastructure."

Adopting SOA can prepare an enterprise for cloud computing, says Tim Hall, director of SOA products for Hewlett-Packard's software group, by showing what challenges an organisation faces internally in supporting service components — challenges that using cloud services will exacerbate. The service orientation in SOA and the cloud make for similarities, he says, such as both concepts requiring a governance layer and a strong understanding of processes.

Both the cloud and SOA determine what are some of the major reusable components and what are the right technologies to run large-scale components over open networks, says Rob Helm, director of research at Directions on Microsoft. He notes that an organisation that has moved toward SOA in a modular fashion, is in a better position to move modules to the cloud.

The cloud serves as a good way to deploy services in an SOA environment, says Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO of open source SOA software vendor WSO2. He says SOA and the cloud support each other, but are not based on the same ideas: "Cloud computing is a deployment architecture, not an architectural approach for how [to] architect your enterprise IT [as SOA is]."

SOA could have a role to play in the integration of cloud applications back into legacy systems, says Lew Tucker, Sun Microsystems' CTO for cloud computing. (Sun plans to unveil its cloud plans on March 18).

Another connection between SOA and the cloud is the enhanced buildup of the terms, Hall says. "People overhype it and then it goes through [a period] of disillusionment," he notes — something that has already happened to SOA. Afterwards, a technology is used in a more pragmatic fashion.

Source: www.computerworld.co.nz

The Only Enterprise IT Event in 2010

Cloud computing is steadily becoming an integral
part of the enterprise computing environment.


Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term "cloud computing" was coined. That same year, the first Cloud Expo took place in New York City with 450 delegates. This coming November 2010, Cloud Expo is returning to Santa Clara with more than 5,000 delegates and over 100 sponsors and exhibitors.

"Cloud" has become synonymous with "computing" and "software" in two short years. Cloud Expo is the new PC Expo, Comdex, and InternetWorld of our decade. By 2012, more than 50,000 delegates per year will participate in Cloud Expo worldwide.

The cloud is certainly a compelling alternative to running all applications within a traditional corporate data center. But moving from theory into practice is where things get complicated, and this is where attending a top industry event like Cloud Expo comes in.

No one can take full advantage of cloud computing without first becoming familiar with the latest issues and trends, which is why the organizing principle of the 7th International Cloud Expo on November 1-4, 2010, is to ensure - through an intensive four-day schedule of keynotes, general and breakout sessions, and our bustling Expo Floor - that attending delegates leave the Santa Clara Convention Center with abundant resources, ideas and examples they can apply immediately to leveraging the Cloud, helping them to maximize performance, minimize cost and improve the scalability of their Enterprise IT endeavors.

Delegates will leave 7th Cloud Expo with dramatically increased understanding of the entire scope of the cloud computing spectrum, from storage to security.

The Santa Clara Convention Center is the only place to be November 1-4, 2010, if you build, sell or purchase applications or infrastructure delivered as a cloud service. End users, IT professionals and vendors alike are all encouraged to participate.

Source: http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/

Services as Web Services

It is very important to view and position SOA as an architectural model that is agnostic to any one technology platform. By doing so, an enterprise is given the freedom to continually pursue the strategic goals associated with service-oriented computing by leveraging future technology advancements. In the current marketplace, the technology platform most associated with the realization of SOA is Web services.

The popularity of Web services preceded that of service-oriented computing. As a result, their initial use was primarily within traditional distributed solutions wherein they were most commonly used to facilitate point-to-point integration channels. As the maturity and adoption of Web services standards increased, so did the scope of their utilization. With service-oriented computing comes a distinct architectural model that has been positioned by the vendor community as one that can fully leverage the open interoperability potential of Web services, especially when individual services are consistently shaped by service-orientation. For example, when exposing reusable logic as Web services, the reuse potential is significantly increased. Because service logic can now be accessed via a vendor-neutral communications framework, it becomes available to a wider range of service consumer programs. Additionally, the fact that Web services provide a communications framework based on physically decoupled service contracts allows a service contract to be fully standardized independently from its implementation. This facilitates a potentially high level of service abstraction while providing the opportunity to fully decouple the service from any proprietary implementation details. As explored at http://www.soaprinciples.com/, all of these characteristics are desirable when pursuing key principles, such as Standardized Service Contracts, Service Reusability, Service Loose Coupling, Service Abstraction, and Service Composability.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services: The Road to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

by Qusay H. Mahmoud, April 2010

Most enterprises have made extensive investments in system resources over the course of many years. Such enterprises have an enormous amount of data stored in legacy enterprise information systems (EIS), so it's not practical to discard existing systems. It's more cost-effective to evolve and enhance EIS. But how can this be done? Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a cost-effective solution.

SOA is not a new concept. Sun defined SOA in the late 1990's to describe Jini, which is an environment for dynamic discovery and use of services over a network. Web services have taken the concept of services introduced by Jini technology and implemented it as services delivered over the web using technologies such as XML, Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration(UDDI). SOA is emerging as the premier integration and architecture framework in today's complex and heterogeneous computing environment. Previous attempts didn't enable open interoperable solutions, but relied on proprietary APIs and required a high degree of coordination between groups. SOA can help organizations streamline processes so that they can do business more efficiently, and adapt to changing needs and competition, enabling thesoftware as a service concept. eBay for example, is opening up its web services API for its online auction. The goal is to drive developers to make money around the eBay platform. Through the new APIs, developers can build custom applications that link to the online auction site and allow applications to submit items for sale. Such applications are typically aimed at sellers, since buyers must still head to ebay.com to bid on items. This type of strategy, however, will increase the customer base for eBay.

SOA and web services are two different things, but web services are the preferred standards-based way to realize SOA. This article provides an overview of SOA and the role of web services in realizing it. The article provides:

• An overview of software as a service
• A tutorial on SOA
• An overview of Sun's platforms for building web services
• Guidelines for designing interoperable web services
• Challenges in moving to SOA
• An overview of Java Business Integration (JSR 208)
• A discussion of web services for enterprise application integration

Service-Oriented Architecture

SOA is an architectural style for building software applications that use services available in a network such as the web. It promotes loose coupling between software components so that they can be reused. Applications in SOA are built based on services. A service is an implementation of a well-defined business functionality, and such services can then be consumed by clients in different applications or business processes.

SOA allows for the reuse of existing assets where new services can be created from an existing IT infrastructure of systems. In other words, it enables businesses to leverage existing investments by allowing them to reuse existing applications, and promises interoperability between heterogeneous applications and technologies. SOA provides a level of flexibility that wasn't possible before in the sense that:

• Services are software components with well-defined interfaces that are implementation-independent. An important aspect of SOA is the separation of the service interface (the what) from its implementation (the how). Such services are consumed by clients that are not concerned with how these services will execute their requests.
• Services are self-contained (perform predetermined tasks) and loosely coupled (for independence)
• Services can be dynamically discovered
• Composite services can be built from aggregates of other services

SOA uses the find-bind-execute paradigm as shown in Figure 1. In this paradigm, service providers register their service in a public registry. This registry is used by consumers to find services that match certain criteria. If the registry has such a service, it provides the consumer with a contract and an endpoint address for that service.

The SOA Evolution

Today, more and more companies understand the need for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Drawn primarily by the promise of interoperability in an increasingly global and heterogeneous business world, Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) allow firms to better align their business needs and IT infrastructure, lower development costs, encourage sharing of services, complete integration faster and build industry best practices.

A service oriented approach enables rapid assembly, shortens deployment time and reduces risk of failure so you can keep your organization more agile and profitable. SOA is the latest evolution in distributed computing.

SOA Consulting Services Group
Whether a company is migrating application design practices and tools toward a style that creates shared, reusable and distributed services or building new SOA applications and solutions in an enterprise, the SOA Consulting Services Group assists companies achieve their SOA goals.

Our team of SOA Architects and Consultants can assist companies looking to expedite their SOA migration by successfully leveraging SOA technology solutions such as:

Complex Event Processing (CEP)
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
SOA Governance
Composite Applications
Business Process Management (BPM)
Business Intelligence (BI)
Benchmarking
Read our Standardizing on SOA White Paper to find out why we should be your SOA Consulting choice.

SOA Architect / SOA Consultant Role
With a strong understanding of the enterprise from a business perspective, our vendor agnostic SOA Architects and Consultants will assist your company in developing SOA principles and best practices that guide planning, development, integration and management of application infrastructures. Our services include:

SOA Readiness Assessment: we will establish a SOA roadmap by assessing the customer's current state and readiness for SOA
SOA Business Case Analysis: our architects and consultants will work closely with the business owner(s) to demonstrate the value of a SOA in their environment
SOA Application Analysis: we will work closely with the Information Systems group to identity which of their applications should form the basis of a SOA
Looking for SOA Training? Designed for all audiences, our 2 day training course will provide insights and knowledge in adopting and especially implementing a services based architecture.

Industry Verticals : Primary Areas of Expertise
Financial Services
Insurance
Health Care / HIPAA
Real Estate / Mortgage Banking
Solutions : Primary Areas of Expertise
Complex Event Processing (CEP) Consulting and Implementations
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Consulting and Implementation Services
SOA Governance Consulting and Implementation Services
RDBMS / SQL Architecture, Design, Analysis and Reporting
Please fill out our inquiry form and a representative will contact you directly. There is absolutely no obligation.