Systems/Enterprise:

SERVICE INTEGRITY ANNOUNCES SOAdvantage

Service Integrity Inc, providers of distributed-application monitoring and analysis software, announced the creation of SOAdvantage, an elite customer focus group. The collaborative, cross-industry panel was created to help executives share best practices for implementing Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The first conference was held Sept. 15 in Boston, and attracted over 30 participants from leading companies such as Hewlett-Packard, BankOne/JP Morgan Chase, Veritas, IBM, CGI-AMS, Pegasystems and Microsoft.

The keynote speaker at the event was Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, an analyst firm in the SOA market. ZapThink predicts that more than half the Global 2000 will have adopted SOA somewhere in their organization by 2006, and by 2010, SOA will be the dominant architectural approach across all large companies.

"SOA is architecture, and as such, consists of best practices that companies must adhere to in order to attain the business agility benefits SOA promises," said Bloomberg. "As companies tackle the challenges that moving to SOA presents, it's important that they realize that SOA is a discipline they must follow."

In addition to Bloomberg's keynote, the event included customer presentations documenting specific SOA use cases, and a demonstration into advanced applications of Service Integrity's SIFT software. A second conference is slated for the first quarter of 2005, to be chaired by Arthur Mateos, vice president of products for Service Integrity.

"We're privileged to have customers and partners that clearly understand the value of a service-oriented business. As the leader in monitoring and analysis of SOA, it was incumbent upon us to create this event. The response has been overwhelmingly positive," said Michael Madden, president and CEO of Service Integrity. "SOAdvantage provides a thought leadership opportunity to share best practices as well as ongoing guidance in how to utilize our technology to accelerate return on our customers' SOA investments."

"Continuing to gather feedback from customers, partners and industry analysts will be the foundational elements for building our next conference agenda," stated Mateos. "Through our work with SOAdvantage, we hope to offer the insight, resources and recommendations needed to speed the adoption of service-oriented business models."

The second conference, like the first, will focus on real-life user experiences, some at the early stages of SOA deployment; others with more advanced implementations. Sharing best practices will continue to be a recurring theme: those offered and shared by participants, coupled with advice from leading SOA authorities.