Information always has and always will be the lifeblood of a company. But globalization has profoundly changed how a business collects and exchanges data, and with whom an organization shares that information. In today's sprawling digital enterprise, operations are no longer contained to a single floor, building, or even one campus, country, or continent. Additionally, the outsourcing and offshoring of many basic operations mean the accounts payable office that used to be down the hall may now be in Poland. This complicates transaction processing as more third-parties need to access corporate data stores to support operational functions.

As the demand for new medicines grows, so does the need for better information to manage and execute the R&D processes. There is huge pressure to make informed decisions, especially during the project's early stages when the risk is high and before downstream costs are added. Pfizer spends billions on research projects annually. At Pfizer Global R&D where the company's drug discovery takes place, research scientists and managers require vast amounts of up-to-the-minute information on lab results, submission status, and project schedules to move new research forward quickly.

Covergence is the creator of Eclipse, an award-winning series of next-generation session border control solutions. Recently, the company unveiled the Covergence Policy Manager, a policy enforcement solution for real-time applications. Using Policy Manager, organizations can now build session policy enforcement into applications that include VoIP, video, IM, presence, conferencing, shared workspaces, and other forms of real-time communications.

The financial services industry is well suited to application solutions based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) due to the heterogeneity across front-, mid-, and back-office systems and different business lines. Many financial services firms, particularly those that have undergone mergers or acquisitions, can benefit from SOA as they are burdened with legacy data silos, redundant applications, overlapping functionality, brittle proprietary systems, and steep integration costs.

Like many other enterprises, IBM is transforming itself in response to fierce global competition and partnering, real security threats, the plethora of regulatory requirements, and demands for more flexibility and agility. Service-oriented thinking and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) play an important role in this transformation.

For the past six years I've been engaged in a project to re-engineer a legacy enterprise IT system of a large international bank. The company still had applications with host terminal emulation that were to be replaced with Windows- and Web-based client applications. The host system was completed based on legacy applications that evolved since the 1970s. Any new applications had to interoperate with the existing legacy applications. A strategy to replace difficult-to-maintain legacy applications with new applications was implemented.

Although organizations use multiple technologies to solve myriad business problems, integrating two or more of these technologies to derive new business benefits presents additional challenges. This is especially true when the collaboration extends beyond an organization's own systems to include those of its business partners.

ChoicePay has embarked on a strategic Web Services-based SOA initiative as part of its ongoing effort to improve customer and partner service. To meet its service improvement objectives, ChoicePay builds reliable and robust Web Services. It continues to enhance its service objectives without compromising overall quality through short, iterative, and demanding Web Services testing cycles.

At MedicAlert we have vividly seen how a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can enable business agility and elevate the value of the IT organization's work. Since we launched our SOA initiative two years ago, we have laid the foundation for vital new forms of collaboration with partners and accelerated the introduction of new products and services that can strengthen the business.