Virtualization has quickly become a staple new concept for enterprise IT. At SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, June 23-24, we had exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT. The two content-packed days emphasized value with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of virtualization.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Sonoa Systems announced that Sterling Infosystems has selected its ServiceNet solution to more effectively operate Sterling's SOA infrastructure and ensure enterprise-class security, manageability and performance of these customer-facing Web services.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Scott Guthrie isn't much bothered whether they're called 'Rich Internet Applications' or 'Rich Interactive Applications' - Microsoft, where Guthrie is Corporate Vice President of the .NET Developer Platform and therefore head of the Redmond team behind Silverlight 2, uses both. In a recent interview he says 'We use each kind of interchangeably. Mostly we just call them RIAs now.'

As the field of service-oriented architecture (SOA) evolves, it brings interesting challenges that should be addressed in order to drive its adoption and realize the benefits it has been promising. It took a while for many to understand that SOA is not purely a technology issue.

Apple got pared in after-hours trading Monday, dropping 18 bucks, close to 11%, apparently because of the weak guidance it issued for the current quarter and because it declared the state of Steve Jobs' health off-limits on a day when the New York Post revisited speculation that he's critically ill.

OpenSpan announced that it closed $13 million of C-round venture capital funding. The round was co-led by FTVentures and Globespan Capital Partners, and included re-investments from Matrix Partners, Sigma Partners and Imlay Investments. The funding will help OpenSpan accelerate its growth with strategic new hires, expanded operations, including international markets, and continued investments for building out the company's innovative client-side integration technology.

DataDirect and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation announced the availability of the DataDirect Data Integration Suite. The new offering combines DataDirect Technologies' existing XML-based technologies in one package with a single, simple installation. Software developers now have the combined power of the DataDirect XQuery, DataDirect XML Converters (Java and .NET) and Stylus Studio products to meet their immediate data transformation and aggregation needs.

Forum Systems announced it has partnered with Techlogix to bring SOA products to markets in United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Asia-Pacific. Techlogix will supply Forum Sentry with installation and architecture consulting services to its large customer base across Asia-Pacific and United Arab Emirates.

WSO2 announced that it has extended its support for service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance through enhanced authentication. Version 1.5 of the WSO2 Identity Solution for strong Web authentication based on open standards and open source is now generally available and adds support for OpenID, a feature for decentralizing single sign-on. Additionally, WSO2 has joined the OpenID Foundation and is a founding member of the Information Card Foundation, which was launched June 23, 2008.

AmberPoint announced that it has joined the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, where it will work with SAP to provide best practices for integrating its service-oriented architecture (SOA) runtime governance solutions with SAP enterprise services. AmberPoint intends to work with the SAP Co-Innovation Lab team to demonstrate and extend its SOA runtime governance capabilities by highlighting new use cases and scenarios, as well as identifying and sharing best practices showing how AmberPoint's solutions complement SAP solutions.

IONA has announced that Chariot Solutions has become a FUSE Partner. Chariot Solutions, as a FUSE Partner, will resell IONA's FUSE family of Open Source services and solutions to address customers' enterprise Open Source requirements.

IONA announced that Chariot Solutions has become a FUSE Partner. Chariot Solutions, as a FUSE Partner, will resell IONA's FUSE family of Open Source services and solutions to address customers' enterprise Open Source requirements. As a FUSE Partner, Chariot Solutions' consulting customers will have access to IONA's services for its FUSE product family, featuring fully supported, enterprise releases of leading Apache Open Source projects including ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, CXF and Camel.

Red Hat announced that InfoCamere, an organization responsible for managing the IT systems that connect and secure over 100 Italian Chambers of Commerce, relies on Red Hat and JBoss solutions for flexibility, reliability and ease of use for its mission-critical systems.

Esker announced that it has signed a USD$1M enterprise agreement to implement Esker DeliveryWare for a Fortune 50 electronics manufacturer, enabling the company to automate the delivery of sales order documents into its SAP system.

SAP announced the opening of a second SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Ohtemachi, Tokyo, Japan. Joining the co-innovation lab, located in Palo Alto, California, the addition further broadens efforts by SAP to work with software solution partners, technology partners, service partners and customers to accelerate the innovation and delivery of solutions designed to address industry-specific business issues for companies around the world.

Microsoft added this week workflow capabilities to BizTalk Services, the company's platform-in-the-cloud project for SOA and business process management.

This is a reference guide to what each of the major software vendors are doing in the SaaS space. I won't be sensational and predict the demise of any of these vendors. I think it's far too early to tell how the future will pan out. I can say subjectively that I am impressed with Larry Ellison's pioneering efforts in the space. I can also say that SAP is currently the media whipping boy in the space, with delays in their Business ByDesign program costing them credibility.

In order to discuss some of the issues surrounding The Cloud concept, I think it is important to place it in historical context. Looking at the Cloud's forerunners, and the problems they encountered, gives us the reference points to guide us through the challenges it needs to overcome before it is adopted.

Talk to any seasoned application developer who's about to embark on a new web application project and you can bet on the following: they have decided on or have narrowed down their choice on an application development framework. Talk to engineers and administrators that manage the online service of a SaaS or eCommerce business, and you see quite a different picture. Indeed, you'll even find a different set of assumptions.

A new global survey issued by Software AG suggests that enterprise adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has 'crossed the chasm'. Users also identified SOA governance as a key component of sustainable implementations with holistic, lifecycle approaches viewed as a core requirement. However, the overall maturity of their adoption was regarded as moderate with the state of their governance practices considered lacking.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

First Trace has completed development and released Korrigo, a standards-based engineering document management product. Korrigo is the newest addition to the KinnosaONE product family. KinnosaONE is a suite of service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions built on open standards that solve a common industry problem: How to unify engineering with the greater corporate document management strategy.

iTKO LISA announced the general availability release of LISA 4.5. LISA 4.5 extends the functionality of the LISA 4 suite, adding service virtualization for load and performance testing, and customer-driven enhancements. iTKO customers value the product for its unique ability to test both their existing EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) business processes, as well as emerging SOA initiatives.

It looks like pretty soon all computing will be called cloud computing, just because the cloud is 'in.' Fortunately most computer savvy folks actually have a pretty good idea of what the term 'cloud computing' means: outsourced, pay-as-you-go, on-demand, somewhere in the Internet, etc. What is still confusing to many is how the different offerings compare from Amazon Web Services to Google App Engine and Force.com. I recently heard a characterization of three different levels of clouds which really helps put the various offerings into perspective.

Eaton Steel is relying on the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Database and Oracle SOA Suite, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to gain insight into its supply chain network and financial results, simplify transactions with its network of partners and help reduce costs by automating key business processes.

Black Duck Software announced that IONA Technologies has licensed and deployed the Black Duck Protex platform to ensure the proper use and validation of open source code in IONA's product development organization. IONA developers, managers and legal counsel use Protex to increase the efficiency of the development process by evaluating open source licenses, security issues and other potential complications related to open source code assembly.

Information Technology is fantastic, absolutely essential, and largely responsible for this country's increase in productivity over the past decade or so. It's also broken. IT is overly complex, difficult to implement correctly, and expensive to maintain over its short lifespan.

A new global survey issued today suggests that enterprise adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) has 'crossed the chasm'. Users also identified SOA governance as a key component of sustainable implementations with holistic, lifecycle approaches viewed as a core requirement. However, the overall maturity of their adoption was regarded as moderate with the state of their governance practices considered lacking. The Best Practices for SOA Governance User Survey (Summer 2008) was produced by Software AG.

E-mail is extremely easy to adopt and use, and lends itself very well to certain types of collaboration. When two people are attempting to collaborate asynchronously, e-mail is usually the best solution. It's certainly far less frustrating than phone tag. But once more people are involved, email's utility rapidly degenerates. While the rise of free, open-source solutions makes it tempting to build one's own collaboration tools, on-demand or Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions are the better choice for the majority of users and uses.

LISA Virtualize (formerly LISA Virtual Service Environment) allows teams to decouple themselves from dependency on live or unfinished systems and components throughout the lifecycle of building and testing SOA applications. LISA Virtualize models the expected functionality of any Service within SOA applications, whether that is a Web Service (WSDL), an integration layer such as an ESB, or an implementation layer such as an EJB, mainframe or database, and represents that Service virtually, with a high level of dynamic input and output capabilities and performance characteristics that simulate the real-world behaviors of complex systems. A Virtual Environment instance in LISA saves the team more than 90% of the cost of producing a replicated environment by other means, and allows teams to work in parallel instead of being constrained by each other's lifecycles, which increases agility and quality.

IONA's advanced SOA infrastructure suite, IONA Artix, offers a standards-based approach to SOA deployment that complements existing infrastructures and makes integration with future technologies more affordable. By commoditizing proprietary, centralized middleware deployments and allowing SOA to conform to the needs of enterprises, IONA Artix delivers on the promise of SOA, including business agility, increased ROI and lower operational costs.

SOALayers is a comprehensive SOA platform designed to assemble, manage and govern composite enterprise applications. It enables business process composition, integration, governance and policy management, and SOA infrastructure management. As a platform, SOALayers has a Studio to build composite applications and an enterprise service bus (ESB) for integration, mediation and loose coupling. Enterprise and inter-enterprise services are wired using a process server and a business rules engine for greater flexibility in adopting policy changes rapidly. Process automation is extended to human workflows to support requirements like reviewing, approving, escalating, and exception/error handling.

AppTrigger extended its capabilities for market-leading messaging provider Unisys and their customers by expanding its features for the Unisys Application Session Controller (ASC) offering. AppTrigger?s latest product release has coincided with the expansion of the Unisys Application Session Controller (ASC) offering to customers of the Unisys UVMS/VSE550 solution.

EXTOL International, Inc. a provider of integration software applications for both internal and external collaboration, announced support of IBM?s i 6.1 operating system. EXTOL solutions enable companies to exchange and integrate transactions and documents, regardless of form or format, between their applications and those of their partners.

Composite applications are the new breed of applications that are built rapidly by composing ready-made configurable and customizable service components together. This is similar in spirit to creating new recognizable objects by snapping together pre-fabricated Lego blocks in unforeseen ways.

Managed Methods has announced support of REST style services to their patent pending Agentless deployment options. JaxView has several different deployment options including XML/Firewall, Agentless, Agent stub and ESB integration. Although JaxView has had support of REST services in other deployment options, the agentless option only supported SOAP standard based services, until now.

According to the Burton Group, the issues around SOA are not so much about technology and complexity as they are about the people and the processes within an enterprise. Indeed, in a recent article by Jon Brodkin, some of these issues are highlighted. The core issue is that IT thinks tactically, and SOA is strategic. They are not finding a middle ground.

When there are lots of solutions, choosing the right products to build your software is really challenging. Identifying the right combination of middleware products to build your SOA is key to its success. This article discusses an approach to using non-functional requirements in choosing these products, using SOA in health care as an example.