OASIS Members Form Committee to Develop Blueprints for SOA Business Requirements

Business Wire, August 15, 2005

BOSTON -- Adobe Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, DataPower, Infravio, MW2 Consulting, Raining Data, Satyam, Software AG, and Others Join to Define Examples of SOA Business Profiles

Members of the OASIS international standards consortium announced plans to develop concrete examples of business requirements for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementations. The new OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee will define vendor-neutral "recipes," focusing on use cases and real world requirements that can be fulfilled by the deployment of services using SOA methods.

"There is a shortage of clear, demonstrable examples of working SOA implementations that teams can use to jumpstart new projects," said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst, ZapThink LLC. "By defining an archetypal set of business requirements and functions that SOA best practices can address, the adoption blueprints will encourage the production of useful implementation examples and lower the risk of SOA initiatives overall."

Each adoption blueprint produced by the OASIS Committee will provide a business problem statement, a set of business requirements, and a normative set of functions to be fulfilled, all on a vendor- and specification-neutral basis. Early work being contributed to OASIS as part of this project described the needs of a fictitious enterprise, "Generico," which could be fulfilled by a variety of SOA approaches. Multiple vendor and service providers have already implemented this specification. The OASIS Committee expects that external parties will continue to use these blueprints as patterns for comparable implementation examples.

"SOA builders and end users will be primary participants, as well as beneficiaries, of this effort," said Miko Matsumura of Infravio, proposed chair of the OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee. "Each blueprint will provide a community of SOA best practice as well as a clear way to evaluate technology suppliers." He emphasized that the new OASIS Committee remains open to all interested parties, and strongly encouraged SOA implementers, regardless of their size or geographic location, to become involved.

Members of the OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee include representatives of Adobe Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, DataPower, Infravio, MW2 Consulting, Raining Data, Satyam, Software AG, and others. The Committee proposers also plan to work closely with and consider use of other relevant standards efforts, such as the SOA Reference Model also under development at OASIS.

"It's very encouraging to see strong demand for clear guidance on practical methods used in service-oriented systems," said James Bryce Clark, OASIS director of standards development. "At OASIS, user-oriented projects such as this new Committee can work closely with functional standards to demonstrate how these technologies combine to solve real-world business problems."

Support for SOA Adoption Blueprints

Booz Allen Hamilton

"We believe that the work of the OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints Committee will be instrumental in the creation of service-oriented systems for our clients through the availability of a valuable set of blueprints that can be applied consistently to the SOA implementation process," said Joseph Chiusano, Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. "These blueprints, when combined with the work of other OASIS committees such as the SOA Reference Model, are an evolutionary step along the path to an integrated set of techniques and methodologies for SOA. This is consistent with the future direction and guidance of the US federal government in regards to SOA and guidance from the Architecture and Infrastructure Committee (AIC)."

DataPower

"DataPower has experience with hundreds of SOAs, and we look forward to sharing these security and management reference architectures with the OASIS Blueprints activity," said Eugene Kuznetsov, chairman and CTO at DataPower. "Enterprise architects are clamoring for pragmatic, unbiased guidance to implementing SOAs, and OASIS is uniquely positioned to help. Now that key OASIS building standards such as WS-Security, WSDM, UDDI, and SAML are firmly established, it is time to show how they can be best used together--relying in part on production experience from DataPower and others."

Infravio

"Infravio is gratified to bring our real world SOA engagement experiences to the front line of SOA Adoption best practices at OASIS. SOA end-users we talk to really want hands-on yet vendor-neutral SOA examples," said Srinivas Balasubramanian, CEO, Infravio.

MW2 Consulting

"We are excited about the idea to collaborate and bring to the industry a best practice approach to implementing SOA. This will bring to the table a methodology to rapidly deliver and meet business requirements on any given SOA POC or project," said Michael Morris, CTO, MW2 Consulting.

Raining Data

"Raining Data, with its standards-based and enterprise-grade XML, XQuery, and SOA technologies would like to reiterate its long standing commitment to standards efforts by supporting this important initiative which will accelerate the adoption of SOA in industry," said Ash Parikh, director of development and technology, EAG, Raining Data. "Additionally, Raining Data would like to bring to the TC, our distributed data services and process management expertise, as well as real world domain knowledge in Supply Chain and RFID, Defense and Aviation, Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals, and Financial Services as the building blocks for developing best practices for SOA."