Within any organization, communication between the core business operations and the IT group has traditionally been a challenging and adversarial relationship. Most miscommunications between the two groups result from misunderstandings related to software and other issues. Now the gap between the business IT layer is beginning to close.

We've come pretty far with SOA. Gartner reports that 'SOA' is the most widely used search term on their Website. On Google, a search for 'SOA' turns up 6,750,000 matches. And all of us in IT probably have to wade through some discussion related to SOA on a daily basis. That's a pretty impressive level of awareness and mind share.

Since its emergence, Web Service technology has gone a long way towards perfecting itself and finding its right application in the real world. With the maturity of the specifications, Web Service technology, with its power of interoperability, is now the major enabling technology of SOA, which is being adopted by more and more enterprises to build their application integration infrastructure.

Roy Schulte, VP at Gartner and its research team leader for Application Integration and Middleware, discusses trends and practices for SOA in this brand-new webinar presented by MetaMatrix. In particular, Schulte underlines the important role being played by Data Services.

While new business functionality traditionally requires multi-year development projects, SOA promises new functionality by orchestrating existing services into required business processes. Unfortunately, adoption of SOA is not practical in a single, enterprise-wide, 'big-bang' conversion.

While new business functionality traditionally requires multi-year development projects, SOA promises new functionality by orchestrating existing services into required business processes. Unfortunately, adoption of SOA is not practical in a single, enterprise-wide, 'big-bang' conversion.

In an event hosted by Oracle President, Charles Phillips, Oracle unveiled plans to help customers and partners more easily control, secure and manage large volumes of unstructured content. With Oracle Content Database and Oracle Records Database, organizations can manage the full information spectrum of structured data and unstructured content to help increase user productivity, meet regulatory compliance mandates and reduce business risk and costs associated with the legal discovery process.

Infravio today announced extended UDDI features in the new release of its business focused SOA registry, Infravio X-registry&trade. The move improves interoperability with the standard for Web Services registries with SOA governance, Web Service Delivery Contracts and functionality that reflects Infravio's tremendous depth of customer experience with real-world business requirements for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Creative Science Systems (CSS) today announced the release of BizZyme SOA Suite v6.5. The new suite adds a wider array of new features for delivering greater performance in large enterprises.

Australian software developer, InfoComp, today announced the release of Composer Business Integration Server to further support InfoComp's wrap and fund administration platform, extending Composer's Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

In this second article about service-oriented architecture (SOA), I offer a concrete plan, along with tips and insights, to help you build an effective SOA roadmap, and to help ensure the success of your SOA initiative.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged as a key strategy for IT and line-of-business executives to jointly enhance business performance and agility in today's intense corporate climate. Using the SOA methodology, business applications are built as an assembly of loosely coupled pieces of business functionality, commonly referred to as services. These services are published, consumed, and combined with other applications over a shared services network, which is often highly distributed within and across enterprise boundaries.

As you continue to develop your IT architecture, it becomes clear that the route to achieving real business benefits requires a fundamental change in the way you think about system design. In this article on services-oriented architecture (SOA), I'll share with you helpful tips, insights, and a domain model to help you plan this change, and ensure the success of your SOA implementation.

The requirement of being agile in today's market means having business processes at one's command that can easily be modified for different requirements. This requirement, along with usage of open standards that addresses the problem of interoperability, compels today's business units to move towards service-oriented architecture (SOA). This article talks about the impact AON would have on such business systems.

As enterprises today increasingly depend on IT to help drive business innovation and provide competitive differentiation many are turning to web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) to create the flexible and agile IT infrastructure necessary to be able to be responsive to changing business demands. The potential for Web services to deliver considerable business benefits by connecting organizations to partners and customers cannot be overlooked in today's intensely competitive marketplace. However, the flexibility provided with web services also introduces a significant degree of complexity that is consistently underestimated.

New business requirements are leading companies to change the way they deploy enterprise content management (ECM) data and applications. Faced with the limited interoperability and/or scalability of conventional ECM platforms, developers are turning to Web services as a way to realize ECM functionality and real-time content wherever they are needed within an organization. While this approach is still relatively new and more work remains to be done to improve the effectiveness, it already shows promise as a better way to think about ECM technology.

'In Q2 we saw significant increases in license sales to companies making their initial investment in developer focused automated test and analysis solutions,' said Mark Johnson, Parasoft Senior Vice President of Marketing, as Parasoft announced today that its Q2 revenues grew 140% for the quarter year over year.

SOA Software's Service Manager version 3.0, announced by the Santa Monica, CA-based company today, has been proven to scale to more than one billion messages per hour in a simulated customer deployment.