SOA Software Announces IBM IMS Transformation Product

SOLA for IMS Facilitates Agile Reuse of IMS Applications

LOS ANGELES, CA, Sep 01, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- SOA Software, a leading SOA and Cloud Services Governance vendor, today announced SOLA for IMS, a legacy modernization solution that transforms IMS applications into high-quality, high-performance enterprise services, allowing the mainframe to be a full participant in an Service Oriented Architecture enabled environment.

SOLA is a comprehensive mainframe Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solution that cost effectively turns the mainframe into a seamless part of an SOA enabled environment. SOLA provides customers with a fast and easy way to expose mainframe applications as secure, high-performance enterprise services and allows mainframe applications to consume Web Services. Using SOLA, customers can leverage millions of dollars of existing mainframe investments as part of their enterprise SOA environment. The SOLA runtime environment resides entirely on the mainframe, eliminating the need for expensive, unreliable and unnecessary middleware. Coupled with SOLA's Development Studio, this vastly increases developer productivity, providing faster time to market and lower application development cost.

"Many Fortune 1000 companies use IMS," said Jim Crew, Vice President of SOA Software. "This product extends existing investments and provides growth opportunities for IMS applications that can be reused in new business initiatives."

SOLA for IMS runs independently of any transaction management software, making it ideal for IMS-only environments. SOLA for IMS handles IMS transactions written in COBOL, PL/I or Natural, with multiple input and output segments. SOLA for IMS also allows any mainframe program to easily consume services. SOLA's orchestration capabilities allow multiple IMS transactions to be executed on a single trip to the mainframe, vastly reducing latency. SOLA for IMS can also service-enable DB2 stored procedures and SQL statements.

SOLA is highly optimized, making it the most efficient option for service-enabling mainframe transactions. Much of SOLA is written in assembler language, so the SOLA runtime offers lower MSU consumption and higher throughput than alternatives that use Java and rely on zAAP specialty engines.

Unlike alternative solutions that only offer one or two components of mainframe SOA, SOLA offers a comprehensive SOA solution, further reducing TCO. SOLA eliminates the need to integrate multiple mainframe and distributed products/platforms to create enterprise-class services. SOLA is a Governed Service Platform, making it fully governable by SOA Software products like Policy Manager and Service Manager.

Innovative SOLA features such as One-Click service creation and an easy to use drag-and-drop interface deliver the only secure, standards-based and governable SOA product in the mainframe industry. SOLA provides end-to-end SOA governance for the mainframe with WS-Security, WS-Policy, optimized registry, integrated monitoring, logging, auditing and near limitless scalability, all implemented on the mainframe. This makes SOLA the only solution for companies seeking secure, high-volume, mission-critical mainframe SOA. SOLA is the only product proven in enterprise implementations to handle high volume (10 million+) transactions per day in mission-critical mainframe SOA environments.

About SOA Software SOA Software is a leading provider of unified SOA and Cloud Services Governance products that enable organizations to plan, build, and run Cloud and enterprise services. Our SOA Software Atmosphere Products are built using our Portfolio Manager(TM), Repository Manager(TM), Policy Manager(TM), and Service Manager(TM). They form a unified SOA Governance Automation solution, with SOLA(TM) providing a governable Mainframe SOA platform. The world's largest companies including Bank of America, Pfizer, and Verizon use SOA Software solutions to transform their business. For more information, please visit http://www.soa.com.

SOA Software, Atmosphere, Policy Manager, Portfolio Manager, Repository Manager, Service Manager, and SOLA are trademarks of SOA Software, Inc. All other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.
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For more information, please contact: pressroom@soa.com

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SOURCE: SOA Software

Business Technology Summit - 2010

Technologies that Mean Business















Business Technologies are changing the way we work, live and do business. From being at the forefront of a fundamental shift in the way companies obtain software and computing capacity, Business Technologies are now allowing enterprises to apply the flip side of Moore's law: from providing ever-increasing performance at a particular price to providing a particular level of performance at an ever-lower price.

Centered on the theme Shaping Your Enterprise for New Business Realities, the third edition of India's annual summit for business technologies features some of the most important and relevant tracks that will empower you with all the necessary know-how required for your applications and your company to prosper in this climate, now and into the future.


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For More Information Visit: http://www.btmarch.com/btsummit/conference.html#about

Adoption of SOA in India relatively slow: Oracle

India has lagged behind the rest of the world as far as SOA adoption goes. There is a need to understand the significant benefits of SOA on delivering new business services: Sunil Mehra, Director – Sales, Fusion Middleware, Oracle India
Sigi Achappa
Sunil Mehra, Director – Sales, Fusion Middleware, Oracle India, says that India has lagged behind the rest of the world as far as SOA adoption goes. There is a need to understand the significant benefits of SOA on delivering new business services.

CIOL: What is the traction in the SOA business so far?

Sunil Mehra: SOA helps businesses respond quickly and cost-effectively to changing market conditions. By promoting SOA, they can reuse existing IT assets rather than invest in more time consuming and costly reinvention or new implementation (rip and replace).

The adoption of SOA in India has been relatively slower as compared to the rest of the world. The primary reason is the lack of understanding and misconception that SOA is more of a technology requirement rather than a business decision. In fact, SOA provides significant benefits that ultimately allow companies to focus more resources and budget on innovation and on delivering new business services. In the Oracle Grid Index IV report released in August 2006, over 50 percent of the Indian enterprises said that they were actively moving closer to or have already moved to an SOA infrastructure. In India, customers from banking and financial services, manufacturing, retail, telecom, healthcare and even the government are enquiring about SOA technology.

In fact, more and more ISVs are standardising their applications on Oracle Fusion Middleware, so that customers can leverage open, complete, standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, provided by Oracle and its partners. Customers and ISVs will benefit from lower costs of implementation, accelerated delivery times and a lower cost in the event of future changes. Some of these ISVs include Path Infotech, Q-Soft, Nippon Data Systems among others.

CIOL: What is the rate of SOA adoption among your customers in India vs international?
SM: Like I mentioned, the adoption of SOA in India has been relatively slower as compared to the rest of the world. However, we are observing a lot of interest among customers on this technology.

CIOL: Have customers gone beyond the experimental stage to actual implementation?

SM: Like I already mentioned, SOA is generating interest only now. However, we recently started an SOA implementation at Godfrey Phillips.

CIOL: What are the business processes that are mainly impacted by SOA currently?

SM: SOA is a software architecture that enables business agility through the use of loosely coupled services. Services are reusable business functions that can be discovered and invoked using open standard protocols across networks. Services can in turn be combined and orchestrated to produce composite services and business processes, in accordance with pre-defined policies, security and SLAs. SOA is ideally suited to an organisation where constant innovation is required and where multiple complex systems need to be integrated on to one platform to ensure smooth functioning.

CIOL: What is the key business advantage to be derived from an SOA setup?

SM: SOA benefits: SOA helps lower development and maintenance costs, offers higher quality services, helps lower integration costs and reduces risks for better corporate (SOA) governance. Next, it is easy to implement, without disrupting existing business’ operations and infrastructure. In 2006, Oracle worked directly with over 100 early adopters to understand what types of projects benefited from an SOA approach. Our research identified 100- 500 percent improvement. Some of the interesting findings include:

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One customer changed the game of integration by reducing the response time for integration change requests from two months to five days, delivered without extra budget by non-expert, internal IT staff.
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Another customer reduced time to market of a major IT project from two years to six months, while improving business users’ satisfaction with the application through iterative validation and refinement.
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In fact, the most enlightened adopters of SOA leverage BPM (business process management) best practices such as top-down process mapping, iterative/agile development, and layered-services architectures to fight the “business/IT alignment gap” and derive maximum value from SOA.
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SOA helped yet another customer to fight one of the burning issues of large IT organizations: how to reduce the enormous costs (often 70–80 percent of the IT budget) and resource needs (30 people to diagnose an issue in tightly coupled COBOL code) of maintaining legacy mainframe systems.

CIOL: What are the challenges involved?

SM: As great as the benefits might be, there are also challenges involved in pursuing the SOA dream. Beyond the well-known performance penalty from using XML, there are numerous lesser-known challenges in using a Web services-oriented architecture (WSOA). Nonetheless, belief in the loosely-coupled WSOA mantra might lead you to believe that coupling is not an issue in WSOA. On the contrary, coupling remains an issue, and the real role of coupling in WSOA has been downplayed.

The quest for a more integrated enterprise drives enterprise IT to be more interconnected. A more interconnected system is more difficult to understand, build, test, maintain, change, adapt, or improve. This greater coupling can dramatically increase complexity. An agile, integrated IT is more complex than independent IT processes. In contrast, segregating software functionality into independent pieces is primarily how reliable, maintainable systems are created. This is one reason why many enterprises have application silos in the first place.

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Reference: www.ciol.com/content/special/soa/interview3.asp

Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies

One of the Best books on SOA and has a good introduction. Straight to the point devoid of Buzzwords!

Must Read book on Service Oriented Architecture

Use the following link to get you copy online
http://www.amazon.com/Service-Oriented-Architecture-Dummies-Computer/dp/0470054352/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1280689006&sr=1-2

SOA Compass - Worth Reading!

This book gives a broader perspective of SOA and good Case studies in the End, which will help you understand the SOA in the Real world.

I Personally recommend this book, but make sure you start with some prior knowledge or awareness on SOA and Related terms.

Happy Reading!

Testing SOA: Peeling the Onion

The good news about service-oriented architectures (SOA) is the flexibility they provide for ad hoc integration within and across enterprises. It's also the bad news when it comes to testing, which relies on predictability and repeatability.The key is to first isolate the architectural layers so that functionality can be tested -- and issues exposed -- at their source as early as possible, then to gradually integrate the components until end-to-end business processes can be verified....Contd

To Read More use the following link
Testing SOA: Peeling the Onion

soapUI 3.6 beta1 - The loadUI Release

eviware has released beta1 of soapUI 3.6 The new version contains many features, but is focused on supporting the release of eviware's new product loadUI. soapUI 3.6 also has Web Testing support.

Major New Features:

loadUI Integration

Makes it simple for you to run your Functional Tests created in soapUI as distributed Load Tests in loadUI

Web Testing

Web Services Improved recording functionality lets you record any Web-Based traffic and easily convert it into Functional Tests

Minor New Features:

* Improved WADL importer
* Improved viewing of attachments
* Improved synchronization and performance of MockServices
* Added setting to enable wordwrap in Raw message views
* Increased default memory setting in .sh files
* Added action to clear the current Workspace
* Added option to show namespaces in refactoring wizard

Major bugs fixed:

* Fixed adding of HTTP Query Parameters
* Fixed JDBC Assertions to handle connection errors
* Fixed parameter resolving in script properties
* Fixed showing of passwords in UI
* Fixed bundling of external resources in generated War files
* Several UI cleanups and minor bug-fixes
* Fixed all code-generation to work from command-line tools
* Fixed preview of -f argument in runner
* Fixed usage of correct soap version when refactoring
* Several fixes to JDBC-connection related functionality

Updated Libraries:

* Bundled JRE : 1.6_20

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Originally Published by : SOAP UI
For Information Visit: www.soapui.org
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SOA - Buzzword

GH Tester :Simulation, Stubs and Quality

The world of SOA and integration often involves disparate teams, sometimes in the same organisations, sometimes in different organisations. Integration projects for many years now have involved calling systems that may not exist yet or that cannot be used for testing. Green Hat offer a solution through their GH VIE (Virtualized Integration Environment) product, seamlessly integrated into GH Tester and able to provide production level performance simulation. Users can build simple stubs that return prefixed responses, make decisions based on inputs to return a variety of different responses, and even use datasheets to provide parameterised stub behaviours that can be extended simply by adding another row to a spreadsheet.

Stubs can be used during performance tests too, distributed out to allow theoretical limits of systems that might otherwise be limited by components too slow to cope with high transaction volumes, allowing exploration of what-if scenarios.

Stubs also play an important role with distributed teams, allowing testing to flow around bottlenecks and to enable teams to perform pre-integration with these stubs, reducing the possibility of fundamental errors being detected in the closing stages of the project.

Green Hat stubs are not limited to XML, web services or databases. A range of out-of-the-box industry protocols offers support for HL7, IATA, SWIFT and more on top of all the middleware protocols supported. A powerful user-extendable API allows customers to quickly build stubs for other systems, enabling testing where before it was impossible.

When GH Tester starts a test, it can automatically start the necessary stubs to go with it, ensuring that unresolved system dependencies can be provided with pre-canned behaviours. The user is in control of which stub is used, allowing a wide variety of different situations to be modelled, depending on the testing scenario.

Courtesty: Green Hat Consulting

SOA Case Study - Health Care

Use the following link to download the Case Study

http://www.2shared.com/document/huoFsdP0/casestudy.html

QEdge-Testing Team -Satyam

Software Professionals Life -- Facts!

Spirit of MSat: Special Recognition Award

The Spirit of MSat awards are all about the heroes who have walked the extra mile, put in that extra effort to ensure that ‘Business as usual’ paradigm worked, across the enterprise, under mounting pressures and expectations.

Let this day and this appreciation validate the display of grit and astuteness, tenacity of purpose, the sheer commitment of delivering in the face of adversity, and performance under extreme circumstances & unyielding pressure.

Cheers to the spirit of MSat that lives and breathes through you! Here’s hoping you will continue to strive for greater achievements throughout!

SOA Testing!

Roadmap to SOA Testing

My SOA Newsletter

Open this Link in your Browser to view the Online Publication of this Newsletter:

http://issuu.com/veda/docs/rtso_soa_newsletter_april2008

Evolution of SOA!

SOA Makes Change Easier!

Traditionally building your IT meant Piecing together collection of Hardware, Software and Networking. These components were rigidly integrated. So, implementing change was difficult. With SOA your IT is built with easy to assemble and easily reconfigurable components like building blocks. Think of each building block not as a piece of hardware or software but as a service your business performs say checking someone’s credit, checking inventory or checking shipping status. because SOA works modularly like building blocks you can flexibly assemble your services anyway you want, when your needs change instead of starting from the scratch you can just take apart your blocks and put them back together to make something different. Saving your time and money! You can also add new blocks even combine them with someone else’s and give your IT more muscle to do something new to help your business grow. SOA gives you that Flexibility to change easily and its visibility to change enables your business to innovate.