What's driving the move to service-oriented architectures (SOAs)? According to Sandra Rogers, program director for SOA, Web services, and integration research at IDC, the good news is that most of it is coming from the IT rather than the vendor community. Compliance is a huge issue, as are new regulations that require process tracking and auditing. There's also a heightened urgency to get control of end-to-end business processes. And then there's the promise of speedy deployment, and the high degree of reusability of these systems.We have an extremely informative Q&A with Rogers this issue, in which she talks about seeing the enterprise move from experimental development of SOAs into production and larger-scale environments.

Reinforcing what Rogers says, we also have a feature on Fireman's Fund's ($4.3 billion in premium revenue) wholehearted embrace of SOAs as part of an effort to consolidate up to 70 percent of its technology applications. The goal is to transform its IT organization into a more efficient and more flexible operation. The initiative, in turn, will make Fireman's Fund into a more agent-friendly and more agile insurance company.

And the giant insurance carrier isn't unique in its industry. Most insurers have been experimenting with SOAs and Web services for a number of years now. In fact, they represent the mainstay of pioneers in this technology arena. But relatively few have put SOA at the center of their architectural vision as the means of technology transformation, as Fireman's Fund has. Read on and see for yourself.

Finally, Intel announced the purchase of Sarvega, which specializes in making network routers that use XML to improve network traffic. An XML router can look at the content of an XML message and send it to the appropriate point on the network. XML routers are meant to complement the traditional IP routers and switches that are currently used on enterprise networks. Will this help Intel add to its value-added network offerings, as it obviously hopes it will? Stay tuned.

That's all for this week. As always, let me know what you think of these articles or anything else we post on SOA Pipeline. And have a good one.