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VENDORS SCRAMBLE TO IMPLEMENT SOA

Vendors are thinking more and more about service-oriented architectures, or SOAs these days. Different solutions are appearing as vendors change or add to their products to enable SOA, and vendors are taking notice.

WebMethods Inc's Fabric SOA is a recent release that integrates screen scraping, protocol interception and other methods to separate hardware and applications. In this sense, everything is turned into Web services.

Most vendors keep SOA on their horizons, though most are still learning about it and its importance in the industry. Still, vendors are either re-architecting or releasing new versions of their products so that they may be SOA-oriented.

IBM is now in competition with Fabric with its "on demand" strategy. Though Fabric claims the strategy is exclusionary and of a proprietary nature, IBM touts their WebSphere 6 Application Server as its most interoperable ever. The preview edition incorporated the Web Services Interoperability Organization's Basic Profile 1.0 and JCA 1.5 for both synchronous and asynchronous transactions.


Web services, utility computing, .NET, CPU harvesting and distributed computing are just a few of the technologies that fall under the Grid computing umbrella. Gt04 -- a premiere enterprise Grid computing conference targeting industrial and commercial users -- will gather experts, and outline strategies and road maps for Grid deployment. For more information, visit www.gt04.com.

Grid computing is here!


Websphere 6, which is due out later this year, will be the basis of IBM's SOA on-demand computing strategy. IBM hopes to simplify adaption to business processes within an enterprise by employing the SOA.

However, IBM also faces competition from Sun's N1 and Java Enterprise System. Sun claims that its view of SOA does more than center on software alone. Sun believes that control of both hardware and software is necessary to manage business services effectively.

In addition, Oracle, touting its 10g Application Server, claims to offer the best SOA. Oracle combines database clustering and shared cache, and spreads them across the entire architecture communicating to the application server and disk farms. This decreases susceptibility to error and increases the effectiveness of disk, database and processor resource allocation.

Oracle also claims zero code change as a competitive advantage. IBM, for example, has a grid API that users must download in order to make calls. Oracle argues that its products allow users to simply throw applications on the grid and see results.

IBM, however, is confident that the Global Grid Forum is of a much larger significance than Oracle's grid work, being that Oracle is more of a data company than an application server company.

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