Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been discussed as an important architectural style for the last few years. Organizations have started to develop service-oriented solutions and many are now leveraging services in their production environments. SOA introduces new technical complexities and challenges and makes testing a critical component of the development lifecycle.

Services-oriented development of applications (SODA) is an important development model for enabling organizations to reorient business processes in the transition to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). This article describes one such approach.

Many are comparing notes on two well-publicized paths to achieving SOA. The bottom-up approach is currently the most common variety, where Web services are created on an 'as need' basis to fulfill mostly integration-related requirements. These services are typically application specific and simply re-create traditional integration channels over the open Web services communication framework.

BEA has unveiled a new brand identity, corporate tagline and marketing campaign designed to raise the company's profile and to communicate its value proposition to IT customers. Its new tagline is 'Think Liquid' - coined to reflect BEA goal of being the leading independent provider of enterprise 'infrastructure software,' enabling the free flow of information, business processes and services within and across businesses.

There is no question that service-oriented architecture (SOA) is quickly becoming one of the hottest trends in enterprise computing. IT departments are inundated weekly, if not daily, with the claims and marketing messages of vendors announcing myriad technology and service offerings that will magically transform the way business gets done.

Today's IT environments are increasingly characterized by heterogeneous and complex applications, tight schedules, budgetary constraints, and an ever-changing landscape of business requirements. Few businesses have been agile enough to enhance their existing infrastructures to meet and overcome these challenges in an effective manner.

As the scope of enterprise integration grows, IT organizations are demanding greater efficiency and agility from their architectures and are moving away from point-to-point integration,which is proving to be increasingly cumbersome to build and maintain.

Much has been written about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the many technology and business benefits of adopting this approach. Poised to change the computing landscape once again, progressive IT departments, software vendors, and service providers have all been eager to embrace its concepts - familiar to anyone acquainted with the many past attempts to represent applications and IT infrastructure as modular reusable services.