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The OSGi Alliance just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Another vendor consortium congratulating itself? Not exactly. OSGi has done a lot to make Java less of a mountain to climb. It specifies simpler, independent modules of code that can be modified, even when the application is running. And therein lies new opportunity.

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Not everybody remembers a little outfit called Wily Technology. It was a Silicon Valley startup that caught my eye because it did something that made eminent common sense: it watched a running Java application the way an end user would experience it on the Internet. In January 2006, CA acquired the eight-year-old company for $390 million.

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Join us at 3 p.m. Eastern time today when we'll be talking with my colleague, senior editor Andy Dornan, about virtualization and service-oriented architecture at the official launch of InformationWeek Live.

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Microsoft talked a lot about software modeling this week, but it never mentioned the U word, that is, Unified Modeling Language, also known as UML. That may be because Microsoft has always said UML is too complex. Or maybe it's because UML underlies its competitors' best modeling efforts.

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Speaking to a packed room of CIOs at the InformationWeek 500 conference in Tucson, Ariz., this morning, Stephen Brobst, the CTO for Teradata, made a compelling case that the future of data warehousing lies in "activating" the data in storage to enable automated, near-real-time decision-making to increase business' revenue.

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The database giant Oracle wants to give its customers one-stop shopping for SOA solutions. The open question remains whether its customers are ready.

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Gartner held its Application Integration and Web Services Summit last week, and a flurry of SOA-related news came out of it.

Top of the list was the news that Tibco now offers a way to deploy quick, "tactical" SOAs through the latest version of its PortalBuilder, which minimizes custom coding and makes it possible to connect new Web services to legacy systems and packaged applications. Then,
GT Software rolled out a set of development tools designed to leverage existing technical resources and programmer skills, hopeing to help users pull mainframes in as more active participants in SOAs.

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We had a couple of terrific how-to features this week for you on SOA Pipeline. The first focuses on security and SOA.

Peter Lacey explains why, if your company is ready to begin implementing a true service-oriented architecture (SOA), you'll need to consider what technologies are used to enable messaging and message processing, and how to secure those messages as they flow through the network and are retained in memory or on disk.

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HP last week was the latest major vendor to plunge into the SOA consulting business. The firm has launched an "application modernization" consulting service for enterprises implementing services-oriented architectures.

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The news is sobering, if not surprising. According to a recent poll administered by SOA Pipeline, SOA implementations are taking longer than expected, raising more challenges than anticipated, and returning ROI later than desired.

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This week, we had a pithy analysis of the recent IBM DataPower deal by Lorrie McVittie, which raised some key questions about how IBM will integrate the DataPower technology into its product line.

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We have the results of two surveys from SOA Pipeline for you this week. The first one asked, why consider implementing an SOA? Not surprisingly, more than half of you (53 percent) said you were seeking to lower integration costs. After all, analysts report that the majority of IT budgets these days are going toward integration efforts, and an SOA does promise to enable easier connections between applications and data.

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Last week saw further consolidation in the SOA marketplace, as IBM Corp. announced that it had acquired DataPower Technology, removing from the field one of the last independent startups in XML acceleration, since Intel acquired Savega last summer.

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If you haven't heard of the SOA Leaders Council, it's something you should check out. It's a collaborative peer-to-peer community of corporate and government SOA users who share their experiences and expertise with real-world SOA implementations. There's not a single vendor in sight. Instead, actual users talk about actual projects--both successes and challenges.

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There have been widespread reports that implementation of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) is slower than expected. A new survey of adoption patterns for SOAs and Web services by webMethods appears to back this up, showing that although more than 80 percent of respondents from 500 companies currently deploy Web services, SOA adoption is still "formative."

According to the survey, there are two main things standing in the way of SOA adoption--and concern about the technology itself isn't one of them. Instead, the lack of widely accepted methodologies and related business case analysis tools were cited as the chief roadblocks to SOA.

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Not content to rest easily on the laurels its major announcement two weeks ago that reorganized its software and services portfolio around SOAs, this week IBM added a little more muscle to
its services-oriented architecture (SOA) initiative by signing up
two new partners and broadening its portfolio with new technical capabilities.

IBM Global Services (IGS) plans to integrate and sell Actional's Looking Glass and SOAPstation products, which have the ability to transform heterogeneous environments and services beyond those of SOAP and XML. IGS will also resell DataPower's line of policy-based management functions for legacy and XML transaction flows.

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There's been a lot of blogging lately about the notion that the word "Web" should be dropped from "Web services" leaving only "services" to describe the technology. Jeremy Geelan, of Sys-Con, first raised the issue, quoting a plethora of sources from 19th century philosophy John Stuart Mill to Sun's Jonathan Schwartz and Bill Gates. Among other conclusions he comes to is this one:

Microsoft wants to chain "Web services" to the realm of the desktop where commercial domination is still possible, while Sun wants to liberate the term to the superset, to the Network itself, a technical meritocracy where no such domination is possible but where the overall global market is so vast that any company with even a single percentage point of it can maintain and nurture a vibrant multibillion dollar business.

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This week, IBM put its money where its mouth has been for quite some time: on service oriented architectures (SOAs).

As part of a massive reorganization of its software and services portfolio, IBM finally announced its long-anticipated enterprise service bus (ESB) that has been in the works for years.

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We have the interesting results of two different SOA polls for you this week, each of which sheds light on the way that SOA technology is being implemented in the enterprise.

First, we asked readers if they were depending on smaller, best-of-breed players for their Web services/SOA technologies, or if they were holding out until larger vendors solidified their positions. You told us that most of you (56 percent) have gone with the smaller vendors, as opposed to 44 percent of you, who are waiting for the larger vendors to get their acts together (which in many cases involves swallowing the smaller players whole and incorporating their technologies into established product lines).

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SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) was in the spotlight again last week. An XML-based framework developed by OASIS Security Services Technical Committee, SAML allows companies to securely and automatically share identity information on the Web.

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We recently ran a poll to determine how "in the loop" the CIO is about Web services development efforts. We chose to ask about Web services because that's where SOA efforts usually start: at the grass roots of the organization, used to solve sticky integration issues that can't easily be solved by more traditional methods.

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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.

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Back in 2002, only 5% of businesses had finished Web-services projects, according to IDC. But over the next couple of years, most organizations will have deployed Web services in one form or another, and the overall market should be worth a whopping $21 billion by 2007.

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This week we had a plethora of superb hands-on features on service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

The first one was a review of Axis 1.2.1 by our chief SOA reviewer, Shane Turner. Shane points out that as more companies turn to Web services as a viable means of deploying light-weight, distributed application components, the matter of adhering to accepted standards becomes paramount. One such standard that many companies and organizations have adopted is the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP 1.2 (the current specification level) is an XML-based protocol and encoding format that facilitates inter-application communication across many different hardware/software platforms.

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An SOA promises many things -- you can keep using existing applications rather than building them from scratch, they are scalable and robust, and, if designed right, should be capable of "on-demand" response to the needs of the enterprise.

But one of the trade-offs of SOA is reliability, especially with Web services most often transported over
HTTP. Although there are two new (and competing) specifications that are supposed to address this (Web Services Reliable Messaging and Web Services Reliability) most of today's SOA projects are depending on an
enterprise service bus (ESB) to ensure reliability.

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We have the results of two recent polls from SOA Pipeline for you this week. The first was prompted by Sun's snapping up of SeeBeyond to strengthen its SOA hand; we asked if mergers and acquisitions are good or bad for the industry, and you overwhelming said that they were good. A full 70 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that "Mergers and acquisitions are good for the SOA market, they strengthen the resources behind critical technologies." Only 30 percent agreed with the statement that "Mergers and acquisitions are not good for the SOA market, they weaken competition and threaten innovation."

The second poll was about SOA initiatives and open source. We asked how important open source was to your SOA efforts, and almost half (47 percent) said open source was "very important." Twenty percent said open source was "moderately importantly"; and 33 percent said "not important at all."

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Welcome to SOA Pipeline! On Friday we officially renamed and relaunched the site in order to better serve you, our readers.

The main reason for the name change is that we feel we can make SOA Pipeline encompass a much broader strategic focus. Service-oriented architectures are where most enterprises are heading right now; Web services provide a way to get there (but not the only way). We feel that the pipeline would be able to focus on the overall strategic roadmap to an SOA, which can include a number of different types of technologies, including enterprise application integration, business process management, and other technologies that currently don't fit neatly into the jurisdiction of Web services.

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