Leading Technology Vendors Simplifying SOA Application Development

The SCA specifications are designed to help simplify the creation and composition of services, critical to building applications using services based on an SOA approach. With these SCA specifications now mature, the partners intend to turn over their standardization process to OASIS. Additionally, the partners have completed work on the SDO specifications, designed to enable uniform access to data residing in multiple locations and formats, and will turn over stewardship of SDO/Java work to the Java Community Process and non-Java (C++) work to OASIS.

The SCA and SDO specifications can help organizations to more easily create new and transform existing IT assets, enabling reusable services that may be rapidly assembled to meet changing business requirements. These specifications greatly reduce complexity associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify services regardless of programming language and deployment platform. Both are technologies designed to simplify the representation of business logic and business data. Early customers are already implementing and gaining value.

"We applaud the Open SOA Collaboration for reaching this milestone and for choosing to take the next step and advance this important work through an open standards process," said Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "We look forward to furthering the evolution of SCA from specifications to standards and to promoting the broadest possible industry adoption through education and implementation efforts."

Since November 2005, 18 companies have joined the effort to work on new industry specifications aimed at simplifying SOA application development. Partner companies include BEA Systems, Cape Clear, IBM Corporation, Interface21, IONA, Oracle, Primeton Technologies, Progress Software, Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, SAP AG, Siemens AG, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, TIBCO Software, and Xcalia. Together, these companies have achieved significant progress around SCA and SDO specifications.

"OASIS' guidance brings SCA and SDO one major step closer to becoming the industry standard for service-oriented architectures. Sybase is proud to have been a part of achieving this milestone. The advantage customers will gain from SOA affords Sybase the extraordinary opportunity to provide intelligent data and mobility services," said Kathleen Schaub, vice president of product management and marketing, Sybase, Inc. "SCA and SDO help open the door to a rich, more adaptive future for information technology."

The partners will continue to incubate and drive technology initiatives focused on simplifying SOA application development. Additionally, the group's vendor-neutral Web site (www.OSOA.org) will continue to serve as an information resource for access to draft specifications and white papers, and provide a forum for industry input and feedback - Sybase.