Architecture gets a breakthrough

BEA has created new educational and consultancy services to help service-orientated architecture (SOA) professionals overcome the challenges they face in scaling architectures, reports ITPRO.

The aim of the new educational and consulting services portfolio is to help architects navigate the complex areas of SOA exploration, planning, design and implementation.

The SOA for Architects Education and Consulting Services make use of BEA's experience of working with the early enterprise-level adopters to help businesses create a much-needed roadmap to define both the skills and competencies they need to ensure SOA success.

At the HP Technology Forum & Expo in Las Vegas, all eyes will be on the latest trends in hardware, storage, virtualisation and IT management, reports eWeek.

With such changes swirling around the industry, Encompass, Hewlett-Packard's largest user group, is working to prepare its 16 000 members to be ready to meet these challenges head-on. HP and Encompass plan to sponsor more than 500 breakout sessions and 300 hands-on labs for the approximately 7 000 people who are expected to attend the show.

Dozens of sessions will focus on virtualisation and how the technology is beginning to fundamentally change the data centre. Nina Buik, president of Encompass, says: "The group's membership is thirsty for as much virtualisation advice as possible. There's a lot of focus on virtualisation, what it is, how to work with it and how to manage it."

The general enthusiasm for using service-orientated architecture (SOA) to improve business IT processes is high, but the actual adoption rates have not yet skyrocketed, reports ENT News.

A report from research 2.0 describes the current use of SOA as experimental. The research firm's report of 31 May 2007 predicts that SOA may be embraced as mainstream technology by the year 2015. Packaged SOA applications will become market disruptors for companies such as Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com.

Forester reported in a study that 21% of North American and European (NA-EU) enterprises said they'll adopt SOA in 2007. It also reported that 22% of Asia Pacific enterprises and 14% of NA-EU small-to-medium businesses plan to adopt SOA in 2007.

TietoEnator has been chosen by the Finnish Road Administration (Finnra) as its consultant in the enterprise architecture development that will promote harmonisation of the Finnra's information systems and service solutions and their future development, reports SWBusiness.

The development work will apply the methods and models generated as a part of the ValtIT government IT systems harmonisation programme set up to implement the Finnish government's IT strategy.

Risto Rasimus, information manager at the Finnish Road Administration, says: "This is a challenging project. The Finnra regards development and supervision of the enterprise architecture as a means of supporting planning and decision-making, as it will provide an overall picture of the Finnra's operations and the IT functions these require."