SOA essential for RFID

Adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles by enterprises for addressing integration as well as data access concerns, can significantly enhance their capability to adopt RFID and derive benefits from the same, reports More RFID.

For companies to move from the pilot stage to production and to derive maximum benefits from RFID, they are realising that greater and simplified integration with back-end systems are vital for their initiatives to be successful.

This particularly in the manufacturing field, where the 'slap and ship' approach needs to be moved from one that is manually controlled, to a process that is fully automated and integrates seamlessly with other systems.

British Energy's trading division has adopted an SOA to make the IT infrastructure more flexible to the changing energy markets, says Silicon.

British Energy Power and Energy Trading (Bepet) implemented a process driven architecture (PDA), a process-centric type of SOA, using an enterprise architecture framework to help align its business processes. The company has gone through a lot of changes in recent years - including the move to mandatory electronic confirmation communications, which means it can only trade electronically.

Jeremy Lock, IT manager at Bepet, said the SOA has increased the flexibility and reliability of the IT infrastructure and made Bepet's business processes more agile.

Migrating to virtualisation and blade servers can decrease the number of physical servers IT staffers have to manage, but that doesn't necessarily put the managers on easy street, reports Virtual Strategy.

"A virtualised environment has more managed entities, all the same operating systems as the original plus the VM hosts," said CiRBA CTO, Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of CiRBA, a data centre intelligence software firm.

He says this causes "an increase in the workload on administrators, not a decrease". He adds that failure to change can cause some big problems.