Various companies have established SOA-related initiatives. They include IBM, SAP, Systinet, Infravio
• IBM has established several SOA -related initiatives that leverage its strength in IT professional services. Many companies will adopt the SOA approaches of their principal integration partners, so IBM’s SOA framework will increasingly find its way into many real-world deployments.
IBM recently launched an SOA implementation framework, called Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA ), that encourages companies to use professional services for internal and external enterprise integration.
Managed by the IBM Global Services organization, the SOMA framework guides companies in SOA planning, design, implementation and management. IBM Global Services implements SOMA through reusable software components, best practices and business modeling tools that it has developed.
And, IBM has integrated SOA patterns, processes and tools into its WebSphere, Rational and Tivoli products.
• SAP is also promoting SOA as a core theme for its ongoing product development initiatives. Many corporations will find themselves moving deeper into SOA as SAP, their ERP vendor, adopts service orientation throughout its product suite.
SAP’s SOA focus is on its mySAP generation of packaged business applications and on the underlying NetWeaver platform. NetWeaver implements the vendor’s Enterprise Services Architecture, which encompasses a broad range of Web services standards. Through native Web services support, integration middleware and visual model-driven development tools, developers can built composite applications that bridge diverse SAP and non-SAP environments.
SAP is in the process of decomposing its monolithic R/3 and mySAP application suites into functions that can be exposed as modular business services. By 2007, all SAP application functionality will be exposed through WSDL and registered within a UDDI registry native to NetWeaver, making SAP’s product portfolio thoroughly SOA-enabled.
• Systinet , a leading vendor of UDDI registries, has developed a framework that stresses the central role of registries in policy-based SOA. Systinet’s Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF) positions the SOA registry as the principal policy-management platform for service composition, integration, security, management and other governance functions.
Systinet has gained support for GIF from many Web services management business partners, including Actional, AmberPoint, DataPower, Layer 7, Reactivity and Service Integrity. For several years, Systinet has been a vanguard vendor in Web services and SOA, so these partnerships should be interpreted as strong industry support for GIF as a basis for SOA governance.
• Infravio is a Web services management and Web services registry vendor with its own SOA framework, which it calls “Intentional SOA.” Basically, Infravio’s framework is a checklist that companies can use to determine their requirements and readiness for SOA, Web services, Web services management and registries. One of the most useful features of Infravio’s Intentional SOA white paper is that it clearly delineates the various Web services standards that will be necessary for a layered, full-function, platform-agnostic SOA. In this regard, Infravio is like many vendors, whose Web services and SOA strategies are one and the same.
