Leading Technology Vendors Extend Collaboration on SOA Technologies, Mark Major Milestones with New Partners and Significant Technical Progress

Signifying the growing interest in and adoption of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), several leading technology vendors, who have been working together to create Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) specifications today announced key achievements, including a significant increase in industry involvement and advancements in the development of SOA-related specifications and technologies. The group also launched a vendor-neutral Web site (www.OSOA.org) to serve as an information resource for access to draft specifications, white papers, and for providing a forum for industry input and feedback.

Since agreeing to work together on new industry specifications to simplify SOA application development in November 2005, BEA Systems, Inc., IBM, IONA, Oracle, SAP AG, Sybase, Xcalia and Zend have been joined by Cape Clear, Interface21, Primeton Technologies, Progress Software (formerly Sonic Software), Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, Software AG, Sun Microsystems and TIBCO Software, Inc. With the new partners on board, the group of 17 organizations spans SOA and applications companies to infrastructure and open source providers. Together, they have achieved considerable technical progress in developing SCA and SDO technologies, including new and updated draft specifications. The SCA specifications are designed to help simplify the creation and composition of business services while the SDO specifications focus on uniform access to data residing in multiple locations and formats.

According to a March 2006 Gartner report entitled "SCA Is a Winner in the Quest to Establish a Common Notation for SO", Gartner Research VP Jess Thompson, states, "One of the most important aspects of SCA is that it establishes a foundation for a standard notation for expressing a standard set of concepts for specifying service-oriented architecture."

The group's work has already resulted in the development of new draft SCA specifications for a declarative policy framework; improved description of connectivity with bindings specifications for JMS, JCA and Web Services; and new BPEL and PHP authoring models. In addition, draft specifications for Service Assembly; Java and C++ service authoring; and SDO have been updated.

The SCA and SDO specifications can help organizations to more easily create new and transform existing IT assets, enabling reusable services that may be rapidly assembled to meet changing business requirements. These specifications can greatly reduce complexity associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify services regardless of programming language and deployment platform. Both are emerging technologies designed to simplify the representation of business logic and business data.

For more information, visit www.osoa.org.

SCA/SDO Collaborators

BEA

"As early partners in this effort, it's exciting to see our collaboration expanded with innovative companies that have also recognized the impact SCA and SDO specifications can have in moving forward SOA adoption and deployments," said Ed Cobb, vice president, Architecture & Standards for BEA Systems, Inc. "We're also encouraged by the technical progress w've made since our original announcement late last year."

CapeClear

"SCA addresses the need for a comprehensive, cross-platform component model for SOA," said Jim Rivera, VP Product Management, Cape Clear Software Inc. "We look forward to collaborating with the other partners in shaping the SCA specification to ensure that our customers can realize the full benefits of SOA."

IBM

"IBM is very pleased on the progress made by the collaboration over the last 8 months," said Karla Norsworthy, vice president, software standards, IBM Software. "The enhancements to the SCA and SDO specifications in terms of ease of use, broadened technology applicability and enterprise quality of service characteristics are exactly what are customers are demanding in their SOA solutions. We are delighted also by the addition of the new collaboration partners who will bring broad marketplace expertise into the collaboration work."

Interface21

"Interface21 is the company behind the Spring Framework, the world's favorite framework for enterprise Java development," said Rod Johnson, CEO, Interface21. "We recognize the value that a service-oriented approach brings to enterprise architecture, and are delighted to be supporting the SCA initiative through the use of Spring as a first-class component implementation choice. Interface21 has been at the forefront of innovation in the enterprise programming model since 2003 and brings this expertise to the collaboration. We look forward to working with other leading vendors to make SCA easy and productive for developers to adopt."

IONA

"We are making excellent progress in the advancement of the SCA and SDO specifications, including good alignment with the SOA Tooling Platform Project at Eclipse, mappings for JAX-WS, and significant progress on the policy framework and protocol bindings, among many other areas," said Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA and SCA Policy Working Group co-chair. "The addition of new partners to the SCA/SDO initiative is exciting and we look forward to their contributions as we drive toward completion of the specifications and eventual submission to a standards body."

Oracle

"Oracle welcomes the newest partners to join the collaboration and looks forward to working with these companies to further advance these specifications," said Steven G. Harris, vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle. "By helping to create and refine the SCA and SDO specifications, we believe our customers can quickly realize the full benefits of a standards-based Service-Oriented Architecture."

Primeton Technologies

"As a leading vendor of component-oriented development platform in China, Primeton is acutely aware the need for a cooperative standard to orchestrate the highly heterogeneous IT environment that characterizes its elite customer base of large banks, telcos, and manufacturers," said Larry Huang, CTO, Primeton Technologies. "Primeton hopes to bring a Chinese perspective to the SCA/SDO effort and to facilitate its adoption in China"

Progress Software

"The service component architecture (SCA) specification is a promising initiative to provide a simplified yet powerful component model for SOA," said Gordon Van Huizen, vice president of Sonic and Actional product lines at Progress Software. "SCA moves the industry toward a model in which components can be connected and assembled using a common framework whether they're deployed on an application server, across a distributed, ESB environment or connected through Web services."

Red Hat

"Red Hat is focused on delivering freedom of choice and value to its customers, and we believe that SCA is an important specification for implementing heterogeneous and open SOA systems for our end users," said Carl Trieloff, Senior Consulting Engineer, Red Hat "SOA environments which are well-integrated with Linux and other SOA technologies and platforms are critical for our enterprise clients. To that end, Red Hat looks forward to participating in the development and collaboration of SCA."

Rogue Wave Software

"SCA provides a standard way for Rogue Wave Software to deliver high performance SOA solutions," said Patrick Leonard, vice president, product development, Rogue Wave Software. "The Rogue Wave Hydra Suite supports the SDO specification and is highly compatible with the SCA architecture. As such, we provide solutions that not only comply with these standards, but also help drive adoption and evolution of them, which is a part of our ongoing commitment to our customers and to the industry as a whole.

SAP

"Simplifying the way SOA applications are built and managed is a key focus area for customers, and the technical progress announced today is an important step forward in creating common methodologies and best practices across the industry that customers can leverage," said Michael Bechauf, vice president, industry standards, SAP. "It's exciting to see this partnership continue to expand and become a truly collaborative effort across the industry, reflecting the importance of establishing industry standards around SOA."

Software AG

"IT organizations have to manage heterogeneous environments including multiple application silos," said Ivo Totev, VP of Product Marketing as Software AG. "The concept of SOA addresses these challenges, but needs a platform and language neutral initiative such as SCA/SDO to unfold its full power."

Sun

"SCA represents an important area of evolution for SOA and Web Services standards," noted Mark Hapner, SOA Strategist and Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems. "Sun is committed to providing input to the SCA initiative, and supports a standardization and specification process which is inclusive and yields technology that is simple, easy-to-implement and can succeed in the market."

Sybase

"Sybase is pleased with the significant progress of SCA and SDO. Sybase's Unwired Enterprise vision is to increase information value by extending it to the true point-of-action. Towards this end, Sybase leads the Eclipse Foundation's STP open tools project based on SCA as the composition model," said Kathleen Schaub, vice president of product management and marketing, Sybase, Inc. "Delivery of all these important open standards will help Sybase deliver on our vision by accelerating enterprise ability to create agile, information-rich business processes."

TIBCO Software, Inc.

"Working together with some of the most innovative vendors in the space demonstrates a true commitment to educating more companies on the importance of service-oriented architectures," said Matt Quinn, vice president, Product Strategy, TIBCO Software Inc."Refining technology and vendor-neutral specifications, like SCA and SDO, that give organizations a better, easier way to develop, manage and deploy services across an enterprise service bus and service containers is not only important, but essential to our customers."

Xcalia

"As a founding partner of the SDO specification with IBM and BEA back in 2004, Xcalia is very pleased to see its widespread adoption by the other prominent enterprise software vendors" said Eric Samson, Founder and CTO of Xcalia."We are seeing good traction in the field too and several of our customers plan to implement SDO in upcoming projects that require more open communication between heterogeneous data types and systems."

Zend

"Zend is very pleased to see the SDO and SCA community support expanding to include additional leading edge partners to help shape and drive the initiative in their solutions, which on the whole better serves the broader customer issues in achieving their SOA objectives," said Michael Pinette, VP Strategic Alliances and Business Development, Zend Technologies. "Accelerating the pace of adoption at the industry, customer and solution provider level in new compliant products and services will benefit all parties."

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