|
|
SOA Systems Inc. is a provider of strategic SOA consulting and training services for a diverse clientele, including Fortune 10, Fortune 100, and Fortune 500 companies, as well as international government agencies, and major academic institutions.
Though SOA Systems provides professional services exclusively in the areas of service-oriented architecture (SOA), service-orientation, and the service-oriented computing platform, it originally became known for its expertise in the XML and Web services technology platforms well before these technology sets became part of the IT mainstream.
In the early 2000's, SOA Systems recognized the potential for organizations to achieve true business agility by leveraging these platforms to encapsulate corporate intelligence within layered and standardized service portfolios. SOA Systems therefore became one of the very first leading proponents of the SOA movement. Most of its initial SOA projects centered around integration and federation efforts during which SOA Systems invented a series of strategies that utilized various technologies in innovative ways to attain a powerful level of integrated and federated connectivity.
These strategies, along with numerous standards and best practices also developed by SOA Systems, became the basis for a contemporary integration framework known as the XML & Web Services Integration Framework (XWIF).
In 2003, SOA Systems founder Thomas Erl wrote one of the very first books about SOA in which he documented parts of XWIF. The book was formally endorsed by Microsoft and IBM, and went on to become an international best-seller.
SOA Systems subsequently performed a year-long research project of vendor SOA platforms, resulting in the IT industry's first official definition of service-orientation principles and the creation of a popular mainstream methodology for building SOA.
In 2004, Thomas began writing his second SOA book, in which the service-orientation paradigm and the associated methodology were documented and made available to the public. Published in August of 2005, this book was formally endorsed by senior members of IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, and also became a top-selling title that has since been translated into several languages.
During this time, the notion of SOA became broadly accepted by the IT community and the intensity with which vendors competed for the growing SOA marketplace has since increased significantly. This climate is resulting in a greater diversity of SOA support in vendor platforms, as vendors continually attempt to distinguish their offerings by adding unique features and extensions.
Keeping its original vision of a universal SOA model in its sights, SOA Systems conducted a lengthy research project during which it studied and evaluated SOA support in all primary vendor platforms. The ultimate result of this project was an identification of discrepancies and commonalities across these platforms. By focusing on the commonalities, SOA Systems developed two key deliverables that would end up becoming very important to the SOA community.
The first was a clear and comprehensive definition of “service-orientation" – the design paradigm underlying SOA. Much in the way object-orientation defined the manner in which many traditional component-based distributed automation solutions were designed, service-orientation consists of a set of principles that provide guidelines and parameters for the creation of “service-oriented" solution logic. From its research, SOA Systems was therefore able to abstract an industry standard design paradigm for SOA by the defining the Common Principles of Service-Orientation.
The second key deliverable was the Mainstream SOA Methodology (MSOAM), a structured, generic approach for building industry-compliant service-oriented solutions that allows organizations to apply service-orientation consistently to individual services and, more importantly, to the enterprise as a whole. The backbone of the methodology is a set of standardized service models that organize corporate intelligence into technology and business domains, both of which can be expressed through coordinated service abstraction layers.
In January of 2006 both of these titles became the basis for the Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl, the first ever book series dedicated to service-oriented computing. The series currently has ten titles in development by over 20 authors, most of which are from major SOA organizations. The most recently released book was Thomas's "SOA: Principles of Service Design" and the upcoming "SOA Design Patterns" is expected to go to print in early 2008.
SOA Systems is continuing its role as a respected contributor and pioneer in the SOA community, remaining firmly committed to providing excellence in service-oriented computing.
