Today, enterprises in different industry segments are
exploring various Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) options for their
application environments, as vendors are hawking their solutions to woo the
buyers. These solutions include products for SOA, design, development,
deployment support, post-implementation maintenance, monitoring, management, and
so on.
Vendors are also offering end-to-end solutions to
enterprises. Further, since most enterprises are adopting converged networks for
their diversified operations, solution providers are selling special solutions
for such environments./dq/media/post_attachments/9298acbfe08a0e6bf91c213484f4c47078a3fd3f6b6c5514694de6f821d73349.jpg)
For easy SOA implementation, some vendors have developed
specific tools for enterprises. Tavant Technologies is one such company, as it
has built tools that facilitate meta-data management, integration management,
and complex monitoring required for SOA. “SOA involves many components with
millions of messages. When applications are workflow-driven, it's a great
challenge to know where failures occur and how to recover and manage alternate
flows. CIOs should be ready to implement tools and methodologies to handle these
issues,” suggests Subbu Subramanian, director, Solutions Architecture, Tavant
Technologies.
Moreover, driven by the potential of SOA to serve emerging
segments, software players are accelerating their marketing drives through
various initiatives to capture a bigger market share. BEA Systems, for example,
has acquired Fuego, which specializes in the business process management (BPM)
software industry, and provides SOA solutions to help enterprises orchestrate
and improve their business processes. The Fuego portfolio will become a part of
the BEA AquaLogic product family and will serve as a foundation for the new BEA
AquaLogic Business Service Interaction product line.
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SOA
Offerings
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BEA Systems:
Methodology-Domain Model, Products: AquaLogic suite of products.
Practice: BEA professional services and consultants from its SI partners.
The company is also extending SOA support for the emerging BPM software
market.
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Cisco: Cisco's SOA is
based on an Intelligent Information Network. It promotes more effective
use of networked resources and integrates voice, video, and data services
across a converged platform that can scale throughout a distributed
enterprise environment.
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HP: While HP offers a
comprehensive support for SOA adoption, its SOA services include
envisioning, assessment, enabling, development, and management.
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IBM: IBM's Business
Centric SOA provides extensive resources to customers, as the company
offers end-to-end solutions comprising methodologies, technologies, and
services to automate SOA governance.
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Oracle: Oracle Fusion
Middleware empowers enterprises to manage SOA lifecycle. The solution
enables them to tackle SOA transitioning challenges and covers application
integration, business process automation, and data integration through
specific products.
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Patni: Its solution
includes strategy and roadmap definition, project planning for SOA, as-is
analysis for modernization to SOA, analysis for reuse, evaluation,
suggestion of SOA technologies/platforms for implementation, and design of
SOA involving models for governance, business processes, services,
composite and consumer applications, service metadata, security,
technology (infrastructure) for SOA prototype development for early
architecture validation. It also provides testing, deployment,
post-implementation maintenance, and monitoring services.
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PSI: In the
product-engineering domain, PSI offers wide-ranging SOA-based
architectural competency and perspective. PSI favors an incremental SOA
adoption practice in which the organization chooses sample services to be
SOA-enabled before becoming a service- oriented enterprise. PSI's value
proposition in SOA consists of consulting, requirement, adoption, testing,
and management.
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SAP: With the SAP
NetWeaver platform as its technical foundation, enterprise SOA moves IT
architectures step-by-step to higher levels of adaptability. According to
SAP, enterprise SOA elevates the design, composition, and deployment of
Web services to an enterprise level to address various business
requirements.
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SunGard: It established
standards for the use of SOA, including a collaborative process to allow
the standards to live and a reference implementation including the
best-of-breed components (internal to SunGard as well as external) that
addressed its requirements. Supporting the process and servicing the
reference implementation, it established support infrastructure including
repositories for code, documentation, forums, trackers, and an index of
services. The company calls it the CSA, or Common Services Architecture.
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Tavant Technologies:
Its SOA solution provides ability to build components, messages, ESB
(enterprise service bus), and the infrastructure that orchestrates
business workflows across these areas. In addition to these, it has built
tools that facilitate meta-data management, integration management
(messaging definition, testing etc), and complex monitoring required in
the context of the SOA.
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Virtusa: The company
says that productization is a methodology to create and consolidate
technology assets into Organization Specific Platforms (OSP) that are
leveraged across the enterprise to build and assemble new products and
services. Its enterprise and ISV customers are adopting SOA and are
engaging it in many such initiatives. It helps customers consolidate their
disparate complex software applications developed over a period of time
using various technologies. It offers extensive support for SOA
implementation.
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Now with a bagful of solutions, almost all leading market
players are eyeing business opportunities in the emerging SOA segment. However,
they need to carry out a thorough demand-supply analysis before selling their
solutions. This would enable enterprises to realize the SOA benefits quickly and
help vendors develop market effectively. And that's the objective.
Rakesh Raman
The author is an independent technology journalist.
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in
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