SAP announced findings of a research effort conducted with the University of St. Gallen that show IT projects based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) improve software reusability, reduce operations cost and offer substantial process efficiencies. As SOA is currently undergoing mass adoption and establishing itself as a de facto technology standard for implementing software architectures for increased flexibility and simplified integration, organizations are looking for more economic justification for their initial SOA projects. The study focuses on the SOA business-value proof points that organizations are using to convey the benefits of an SOA strategy to decision makers.

In this wide-ranging interview with SYS-CON.com David Linthicum, CEO of StrikeIron, addresses the hot new Data Services trend and the all-important notion of enterprise mashups, which he pinpoints as the defining technology of the year ahead. 'I'm surprised people are paying me for this work, I'm having a blast,' quips Linthicum.

Carl Icahn, the guy with the shotgun in Yahoo's back, has picked up a couple of friends to hand him bullets. Third Point LLC, a hedge fund, has picked up five million shares in Yahoo on its way perhaps to 10 million shares and is supporting Icahn's proxy battle to sell the joint to Microsoft, Reuters said. And Texas oil billionaire T Boone Pickens announced on CNBC that he bought 10 million shares and is supporting Icahn.

SAP announced plans for the release of SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management and SAP NetWeaver Business Rules Management. The addition of these planned capabilities will further establish SAP NetWeaver as the strategic platform of choice for customers that execute a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. The new tools from SAP are aimed to provide the business process flexibility needed to enable customers to turn strategic business insight into real-world execution. A vital part of SAP's robust platform offering, SAP NetWeaver allows IT organizations to drive more value by providing the agility to respond to requests from the business for new or adapted business processes. The addition of the planned capabilities will enable business process experts to design, model and execute new or adapted business processes without having to develop code. The SAP NetWeaver technology platform and its full set of capabilities allows companies to accelerate the consolidation of their IT landscapes, enabling them to enjoy new levels of the business process flexibility used to drive innovation and competitive advantage.

As Service-Oriented Architectures gain ground, it becomes obvious that their performance is the key to their success. I'm going to briefly write about two sessions that I attended in JavaOne 2008. They outline two totally different approaches from two very different companies. You're going to see that a well performing SOA implementation requires considerable work and performance tuning expertise.

Even though 'Service' comes first in SCA (Service Component Architecture), SCA is a distributed component model. It's about designing components (and composites) rather than designing services. It doesn't feel like it was designed to build a SOA. It feels like its main goal was to define a distributed component model. And as we all know, the distributed component models failed in the past. I think SCA will too.

While SOA has traditionally had something of a data obsession. While the focus has been on service-enablement of structured and transactional data and processes, documents and document-centric processes have been conspicuously absent from the SOA agenda. With structured data in order, organizations are now beginning to take a closer look at the role of unstructured assets as part of SOA.

IBM announced details of new identity software designed to help clients securely manage employee, partner and customer IT users and their access to company applications and information. The new release of IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager software further simplifies the sharing of data between trusted parties -- such as business partners or separately managed divisions within an organization -- with secure application integration and single-sign on technology. With it, users can sign-on to a corporate Web site once and then obtain seamless, secure access to applications both inside and outside of their IT network.

IBM announced that Alcatel-Lucent has selected IBM Tivoli identity management software to help support its efforts to increase security measures, improve employee efficiency, reduce help desk costs and support compliance initiatives. Alcatel-Lucent is deploying IBM Tivoli Identity Manager and creating a standardized process for managing the digital identities of its employees and contractors, with plans to expand the scope to its suppliers, resellers and other business partners. With this new process, the company expects to reduce the total cost of running its IT service desk by about 10 percent.

Azul Systems announced the availability of the Vega 3 Series appliances, which provides a way for companies to run, process, and manage Java applications for their business critical needs. Compared to the company's pioneering first generation Network Attached Processing product, the Vega 3 products represent a fivefold improvement in performance demonstrating Azul's commitment and execution on an aggressive product roadmap. This new solution, packaged in compact 5U or 14U appliance form factors, makes it easier for Enterprises in the E-Commerce, Financial Services, Web Hosting, and Telecommunications markets to maximize transactional volumes and minimize downtime, while decreasing overall response time. The Vega 3 Series provides companies with opportunities to run their businesses in environmentally-friendly ways by aiding datacenter virtualization initiatives and reducing power consumption costs yet still consistently improving the performance of applications.

SAP announced a design and development governance offering for enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA.) The new offering will enable SAP customers to experience tangible business benefits as a result of an enterprise SOA strategy. Growing adoption of the SAP enterprise SOA strategy -- the design and reuse of rich enterprise services to enable efficiencies in business performance -- has led to customer requests for training and education involving SAP's proven design and development governance methodologies to help them speed their path toward enterprise SOA.

The ever-increasing movement towards implementing complex SOA-based applications has triggered a direct attention of leading industry researchers and practitioners to the subject of layering in such applications, in general, and the relationship between the fields of database engineering and SOA, in particular. Common notion of interoperability, loose-coupling between consumers and providers, and complexity-hiding, and demands for enabling extensive reuse of application services to address unforeseen business requirements for new user types, for new types of information and for new composite views has brought to the forefront the concept of Data Services Layer (DSL) as a distinct architectural layer. DSL is an essential part of an application architecture that combines data access functions and corresponding database structures and promises ensuring the next harvest for SOA ROI.

HP has introduced enhanced quality and management software designed to meet new requirements for mainstream deployment of service-oriented architectures (SOA) by businesses. To make sure that services meet all functional and performance objectives and are ready for production deployment, HP has rolled out new versions of its SOA testing products -- HP Service Test and HP Service Test Management.

Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems to work with each other. In the loosely coupled environment of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), separate resources don't have to know how each of them work, but they do need to interoperate with each other by having enough common ground to exchange messages without error or misunderstanding.

Back in the 90s I was on a big project to standardize enterprise software. We wrote a few papers about it, and a chapter in a book. We often used the 'Henry Ford' analogy, which relates to the impact standards for interchangeable parts had on hard goods manufacturing. The Henry Ford analogy says that the hard job in mass assembly is getting the interchangeable parts standardized - thereafter creating the moving assembly line is the easy job.

The SOA Consortium announced that three new podcasts on SOA Centers of Excellence are now available. There were two case study presentations on SOA Centers of Excellence, one by Melvin Greer, SOA Chief Architect, Lockheed Martin and another by Richard Reba, Director, SOA Center of Excellence, CSC. The SOA Hot Topics Roundtable: SOA Center of Excellence is also available.

The new wave of Web applications are built on technologies such as AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight, which enable developers to build better, richer user experiences. These technologies bring a shift in how applications are organized, including a stronger separation of presentation from data. Technologies such as Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and ADO.NET Entity Framework and Data Services simplify the job of developers. The ADO.NET Entity Framework raises the level of abstraction for data programming. It is the evolution of ADO.NET that allows developers to program in terms of the standard ADO.NET abstraction or in terms of persistent objects (ORM) and is built upon the standard ADO.NET Provider model. The Entity Framework introduces a set of services around the Entity Data Model (EDM) (a medium for defining domain models for an application).

URIs are the lingua franca of the Web. They are in every Web page and every HTTP request. In a practical sense, they represent the realization of the Web. Without them, the Web would cease to exist. The situation is very different in the world of the RDBMS. Here, URIs are interlopers. Some RDBMS have provided basic support for URIs via their object extension facilities; however, URIs are still not considered a formal part of RDBMS schema design. This talk explores how URI could evolve to become as important to RDBMS Schemas as it is to the Web.

As SOA rapidly becomes the standard for enterprise architectures, the need for robust technologies for data access and data integration has become more critical then ever before. Due to the vital role that data plays both in business and systems operations, database architectures, information specialists, data integration experts, and anyone responsible for data persistence in an organization are increasingly being called upon to contribute to their organization's SOA initiatives - whether or not this was intended at the onset. In this presentation, we will review the technologies, best practices, and patterns that are shaping the way we utilize enterprise data.

Fiorano Software announced that Premiere Global Services, a global provider of on-demand business process improvement solutions chose FioranoMQ to enhances its e-mail marketing product lines with higher response rates, instant consumer actions and direct results tracking.

The ever-increasing movement towards implementing complex SOA-based applications has triggered a direct attention of leading industry researchers and practitioners to the subject of layering in such applications, in general, and the relationship between the fields of database engineering and SOA, in particular. Common notion of interoperability, loose-coupling between consumers and providers, and complexity-hiding, and demands for enabling extensive reuse of application services to address unforeseen business requirements for new user types, for new types of information and for new composite views has brought to the forefront the concept of Data Services Layer (DSL) as a distinct architectural layer. DSL is an essential part of an application architecture that combines data access functions and corresponding database structures and promises ensuring the next harvest for SOA ROI.

Once upon a time data modeling played a central role in the process of developing applications. Thus far in the SOA era, there has been a heavy emphasis on process, and data has all-too-often been lost in the SOA shuffle. In this talk, we present a data model for SOA - i.e., a service-oriented data model. This model formalizes the notion of a data service, modeling data in SOA as a layer of interrelated data services. We explain the key components of this model, including a taxonomy of data service operation types, a mechanism for capturing the entities that the data services are 'about', and an approach to modeling relationships in SOA. The content of this talk is based on the data services model embodied in the BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP), and the approach is based on lessons learned over a period of several years of working with data services and customer use cases.

AMD has kissed Mario Rivas good-bye and turned processor development over to Randy Allan, the head of its star-crossed server and workstation business, reporting to president and COO Dirk Meyer. Allan is now the new head of AMD's Computing Solutions Group, responsible for the bulk of the company's revenues.

What drives a technology CEO or CTO to success in today's constantly changing technology ecosystem? We look at the question through the lens of the many interviews and articles we have published at SYS-CON.com which deal, sometimes only in passing, with exactly this issue. Executives quoted include Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie, Nexaweb Co-Founder & CTO Coach Wei, the founder of Internet.com Alan Meckler, and the Chairman & CEO of Parasoft Dr Adam Kolawa.

The software delivery process has long faced many challenges, many of which are exacerbated by the need for organizations to update their internal architectures and the methodologies they use to build and deliver solutions. Over 80% of software projects are delivered late, over 50% don't deliver required features and cost overruns exceed 15% on average.

'As SOA rapidly becomes the standard for enterprise architectures, the need for robust technologies for data access and data integration has become more critical then ever before,' says John Goodson, executive leader of DataDirect Technologies. Goodson will be keynoting the inaugural DataServices World one-day event being held in June 24 in New York City, co-located with the 13th International SOA World Conferemce & Expo at The Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan.

'Data services apply the same philosophy of reuse and flexibility that SOA offers, but to the data tier,' explains John Goodson, executive leader of DataDirect Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A in the run-up to the inuaugural DataServices World on June 24th in New York City, of which Data Direct is the Diamond Sponsor. 'Data services,' Goodson continues, 'provide a level of abstraction that frees developers from concerning themselves with the physical location or format of the underlying data.'

'Developers need to realize that Automated Defect Prevention benefits them,' says Parasoft co-founder & CEO Dr Adam Kolawa in this Exclusive Q&A with Java Developer's Journal. 'But they won't start recognizing this until they see that they have less work,' Kolawa continues. The key to success, he adds, is to have an infrastructure handle as much work as possible. 'This way, developers have time to focus on the creative tasks they enjoy most...the ones that truly require human intelligence.'

Once upon a time, data modeling played a central role in the process of developing applications. Thus far in the SOA era, there has been a heavy emphasis on process, and data has all-too-often been lost in the SOA shuffle. In this talk, we present a data model for SOA - i.e., a service-oriented data model. This model formalizes the notion of a data service, modeling data in SOA as a layer of interrelated data services. We explain the key components of this model, including a taxonomy of data service operation types, a mechanism for capturing the entities that the data services are 'about', and an approach to modeling relationships in SOA. The content of this talk is based on the data services model embodied in the BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP), and the approach is based on lessons learned over a period of several years of working with data services and customer use cases.

The workshop is a hands-on session focusing on data access and data services issues, problems and solutions. It's an opportunity for audience members to view and discuss problems with a panel of experts. The goal of the session is to engage the audience using walk throughs, examples, and a question and answer (Q&A) session. The operative principles are interactivity and dialogue.

The new wave of Web applications are built on technologies such as AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight, which enable developers to build better, richer user experiences. These technologies bring a shift in how applications are organized, including a stronger separation of presentation from data. Technologies such as Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and ADO.NET Entity Framework and Data Services simplify the job of developers. The ADO.NET Entity Framework raises the level of abstraction for data programming. It is the evolution of ADO.NET that allows developers to program in terms of the standard ADO.NET abstraction or in terms of persistent objects (ORM) and is built upon the standard ADO.NET Provider model. The Entity Framework introduces a set of services around the Entity Data Model (EDM) (a medium for defining domain models for an application).

A panel of experts and executives from organizations that are leading providers and consumers of technology will discuss trends and important technologies for enterprise and Internet computing. The experts will discuss the role of databases and database technology trends that enhance SOA and web development. The panel session will also focus on preferred solutions for architecture and middleware to enable applications and services to access data from SQL and other data sources.

URIs are the lingua franca of the web. They are in every web page and every HTTP request. In a practical sense, they represent the realization of the web. Without them, the web would cease to exist. The situation is very different in the world of the RDBMS. Here, URIs are interlopers. Some RDBMS have provided basic support for URIs via their object extension facilities; however, URIs are still not considered a formal part of RDBMS schema design. This talk explores how URI could evolve to become as important to RDBMS Schemas as it is to the web. One aspect of URI 'types' this presentation will cover is the use of Web Application Description Language (WADL). WADL has been described as SQL Schema meets REST. WADL is metadata describes the functional and structural aspects of a URI 'type' that a web site or other provider offers through HTTP.

Late Thursday Yahoo released the text of the letter it sent to Carl Icahn telling him he's misguided and that the current Yahoo board knows better what good for the company. It repeats what Yahoo has said before - that it is willing to sell for the right price, which lately has been $37 a share. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Google are reportedly still talking.

An increasing number of verticals are using Data Services - services that deal with the production or consumption of data - to solve real business problems and deliver key information...all completely transparent to the user. Data is after all the primary component of architecture, including SOA, as StrikeIron CEO David Linthicum recently underlined in an exclusive Q&A with SYS-CON.com.

Both Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Carl Icahn - the greatest stockholder activist of our generation - is going to pull the pin to try to force Yahoo into negotiating a deal with Microsoft. It's unclear whether Yahoo's two biggest shareholders Capital Research & Management and Legg Maison Capital Management will support Icahn.

While EDI transactions account for most worldwide commercial activity, XML-based alternatives are beginning to gain traction. According to Forrester Research, stateful XML, stateless XML, and even flat file exchanges are all projected to grow at a faster rate than EDI over the next few years. The firm predicts stateful XML transactions will be required for a growing number of B2B process-oriented transactions and are projected to exceed the growth of EDI transactions over the next five years.

HP CEO Mark Hurd has finally done something that Wall Street doesn't like - he's buying EDS, the IT infrastructure outsourcing outfit founded in 1962 by one-time presidential hopeful and outsourcing pioneer Ross Perot, for around $13.9 billion cash - a venture that some people think is poor use of money better spent elsewhere.

TIBCO announced that mobilkom austria group (mag) set a new benchmark for the mobile phone sector, establishing mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) covering Serbia and Macedonia in just six months using an enterprise service bus based on TIBCO software. The previously unheard-of timescales were made possible through the use of standardized functionality from back-office mag billing and CRM systems, located in different parts of Europe, that were reused for the new MVNOs.

Patni Computer Systems announced its customizable solution framework for the development or modernization of insurance business applications. Initially, the framework will support Patni's application components for Life New Business. Based on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and built using the company's branded PatniPlus methodologies, these application components are architected to integrate with existing custom or packaged applications within an insurer's systems infrastructure.