Gartner: SOA will drive next round of acquisitions by Oracle, SAP | Service-Oriented Architecture | ZDNet.com

Okay, this was a useful forecast by Gartner after the fact. Can we all say duh? As most have been purchased already, the question remains who is left?

webMethods Blogs

webMethods has started blogging. Check it out, they have some pretty smart people over there doing some cool stuff.

soapUI - soapui - tool integrations - ws-i tools

A cool little tool for WSDL compliance testing and test case generation I just started using. It even does load tests which is pretty slick. It's basically a graphical front end (Java based) to the variety of command line tools that are out there. Easy to use and setup.

AT&T buys poster child of ASP boom years | Software as services | ZDNet.com

It's good to see my old company from the .com era mentioned again, Interpath not USinternetworking. We actually built some pretty neat stuff at Interpath in the early days contrary to Phil's comments about services versus hosted applications.

Ah, those were the days. Unlimited budgets, brand new software models, lots of shiny new hardware. And our data center was the bomb baby. We worked like crazy but it was fun.

IBM prepares open-source systems management initiative for Eclipse - Yahoo! News

More on the SOA front. This one on Systems Management with relation to SOA and Open-Source. IBM is leading this effort.

The SOA "Trough of Disillusionment"

This is more discussion on the real world trys at SOA. Those that come from the EAI world know how this works. Many of the EAI projects failed for a lot of the same reasons.

I do think it is important to define what the "business" is. IT is itself a business and SOA has value there. Yes even in a corporate IT shop. There are numerous "business systems" within a corporate IT shop that can benefit from this type of architecture. A lot of these systems are not customer business systems but yet still have an impact on the overall cost and agility of the overall business.

It is an underestimation of the value of SOA to not include the "business of IT".