IBM creates eight SOA centres

IBM will establish the first two of eight competency centres around the world designed to help local IT customers with SOA, reports Computerworld.

"As with other technologies, business people need reassurance that SOA isn't another 'flash in the pan or silver bullet' cure-all," says Jason Weisser, VP and CTO of IBM's SOA division.

"They also need to see the approach working within their own organisations. From a business standpoint, SOA is like the imaginary spoon in the classic sci-fi movie The Matrix. There is no spoon."

The Open Group will create The SOA Governance Project, an effort that will investigate how enterprises can better control and facilitate the development of SOA, reports Linux SysCon.

Key objectives of the project include the development of a standard definition of SOA governance (and distinguishing it from traditional IT governance); the creation of reusable processes and models that enterprises can take advantage of to maintain greater consistency and control in their SOA projects; and the development of a common language that can be used by enterprise architecture practitioners for communicating on SOA governance - both internally and with suppliers of SOA governance tools.

Dr Dobbs Journal has reviewed Amazon and Oracle's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and called it a "match made in heaven".

"We tested Amazon EC2 by marrying components of Oracle SOA Suite with EC2 to demonstrate how utility computing and SOA are shaking the foundations of current IT provisioning, development, deployment and maintenance models," says the review.