Using a halfway house

GridToday has reported on an Aberdeen Group finding that businesses successfully moving towards SOA are using composite applications to get there.

Even if the organisation has yet to properly deploy an SOA, logic and data collected from multiple sources and glued together with Web service standards are bearing fruit.

"The survey found that most companies that build and deploy these applications are seeing higher satisfaction among end-users," says the report. "A substantial number of leading, or what Aberdeen calls 'best-in-class', companies cite lower costs and quick business reaction to competitive pressures as chief benefits from these applications."

InfoWorld has sounded a warning about the vendor consolidation in 2006 in the SOA market, saying the single vendor solution precedes lock-in.

"The wild shopping spree, really an acceleration of a two-year trend, is a tad ominous. Big vendors can now say they offer a 'complete' SOA solution: service development platform, registry/repository, services manager, ESB (enterprise service bus), service orchestrator, and maybe a little BPM (business process management) on top.

"Any proprietary linkages among those pieces foretell classic lock-in: Everywhere SOA extends across an organisation, so goes a single vendor's software."

The Open Group has announced the plenary agenda and preliminary lineup of speakers for its Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, to be held this month in San Diego, reports Grid Today.

"In addition to a special focus on SOA, the San Diego event will also address other aspects of enterprise architecture, providing insight into best practices, standards, tools and technologies and serving as a venue for practicing enterprise architects to come together and share their unique experiences."