New Year, New Features and Forums, New Opportunities

Welcome to the January 2007 edition of Engage.

As part of our new years resolution, we aim to make some major updates to Engage in order to bring you more of what you want, and can use your help in doing so. As you already saw, we began this process to improve the content and design with the December issue.

With this issue, we are introducing two key regular sections to the newsletter: a “Readers’ Feedback Forum,” where you have the chance to provide your feedback on our articles, and an “Ask the SOA Experts” column, where you are invited to propose topics and get responses to questions that can help with the real-world business challenges you are currently facing.

We also plan to continue bringing you highlights of some of our recent successful engagements as well as draw your attention to important events and industry trends.

Read on to learn about our January 9th webinar on safe mainframe integration and an article on what the analysts say about “SOA after the hype.”

We hope Engage can help you gear up for new opportunities. So, enjoy this read and we look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Loek van den Boog

CEO Cordys

Ask the SOA Experts

Through this other new regular newsletter feature—Ask the SOA Experts—we invite you to send us questions and comments about your most pressing business/IT challenges and we will address them in a dedicated column in upcoming issues.

Once you send in your submission, your name will also be entered into a drawing to receive a free copy of the book “Service Orient or Be Doomed! How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business,“ by ZapThink analysts Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer.

Click here to submit your questions and comments to the Cordys SOA Experts.

SOA after the hype
What analysts say about “SOA after the hype”
By Rich Seeley, News Writer, SearchWebServices.com

By now most software vendors who could possibly justify fitting their products into the service-oriented architecture space have become at least buzz word compliant with SOA. The initial hype phase, characterized by a certain "irrational exuberance" has past and developers and architects are actually implementing SOA. To get an idea of where SOA is after the hype phase, we asked a group of analysts and thought leaders where they see it now.

Read the entire story

Webinar Mainframe Integration

Architects and IT Managers: Practice Safe Mainframe Integration!The reliability of mainframe systems for handling business-critical information and transactions is undisputed. But how do you unlock that functionality and integrate it into today’s business processes, without interfering with the stable and proven IT processes that are running on your mainframe systems?

We’ll show you how!

Learn how integrating your mainframe systems into a Service Oriented Architecture will allow you to access and re-use mainframe functionality in a non-intrusive way.

Cordys Ventures to Florida with Gartner

In early December, Cordys sponsored two back-to-back Gartner conferences in Florida attended by senior IT and business leaders who convened in order to address current challenges and strategies on a range of topics including application integration and middleware, Web services, and service-oriented architecture.

At the larger event—“Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit” (AIWS)—Cordys senior pre-sales architect Charney Hoffman presented a case study about the tangible benefits realized by its customer Ertan, a hydropower company in China, through the Cordys' SOA Platform. Senior solutions architect Theo Stolker also gave a talk on the Cordys integrated SOA, BPM and Web 2.0 platform.

Information presented during the conference highlighted the current strong momentum of the SOA market. In his Gartner blog entry posted during the Web Services Summit, analyst Michele Cantera cited some findings revealed at the conference drawn from the firm’s frequent SOA Adoption surveys conducted at other recent Gartner conferences. Among conference attendees who took these surveys, spending on SOA and Web Services as a % of IT Budget (hardware, software, IT services, and staff) increased from 11% in spring 2005 to 18% in June 2006. Conference attendees expect to spend 22% of their IT budgets on SOA, Web Services, and Web 2.0 in 2007. Cantera concluded that “when spending on something reaches nearly one quarter of the IT budget, you can declare that the technology is moving into the mainstream, which is the case with SOA.”