11/06/2007

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), a provider of leading application infrastructure software to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications, is urging enterprises to create federated communities among diverse SOA participants in order to create richer, dynamic user experiences.

ebizQ received the following:

In a new eBook entitled "SOA: Socially Oriented Architecture. Technical Opportunities, Social Challenges," Hub Vandervoort, CTO of the Enterprise Infrastructure Division, Progress Software, explains the importance of enabling organizations to create meaningful interactions between communities to deliver a richer customer experience. To do so, organizations will have to rethink the centralized, top-down approach to SOA governance that is prevalent today. Instead, given the cross-organizational nature of service-oriented architecture, they must develop a consensual form of governance that supports a socially oriented architecture.

The eBook, which is available for free download at www.getsociallyarchitected.com, addresses the emergence of exciting new partnerships created by a service-oriented architecture. According to Vandervoort, these interactions are responsible for the real value that end-users are seeing from successful service-oriented architecture deployments - the formation of a value chain, with each partner adding incremental value by broadening the overall user experience.

For instance, people working in an ERP, lending or other application find leaving that application to access a business credit report, and subsequently re-key information, a disruptive interruption. They'd be better served if the application provider licensed a Web service API for the credit information. This new social orientation is driving both technology needs and management changes in how technology should be delivered and governed.

"At the end of the day, end-users are not interested in how their services are delivered - they care about their online experience," said Hub Vandervoort. "The real power of SOA is its ability to integrate heterogeneous systems in a way that enables users to have that seamless experience. Only by acknowledging the social impact that SOA can have will organizations be able to tap into that power. This means that we need to abandon the traditional, top-down approach to IT governance in favor of a federated, community approach - the socially oriented architecture."

In the eBook, Vandervoort identifies three critical factors that will determine the success of an SOA initiative: free connection of interactions; active mediation of policy; and precise control of semantics. He addresses the technical and social challenges facing organizations looking to successfully manage these factors to participate in a socially-driven, service-oriented architecture.

For example, in a typical service-oriented architecture consisting of heterogeneous systems with independent security domains, integrating systems to create a seamless end-user experience can be a daunting task. The challenge is to get these independent domains to collaborate as a virtual team and share a common vocabulary, optimizing run-time performance while enforcing SOA-wide security.

The eBook provides real-world examples, success stories and best-practices for organizations facing these types of challenges.