SOA Master Class Online launched today as a comprehensive educational resource that is designed to foster mastery of service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts, techniques and skills. This online resource provides users with a formalized curriculum for advancing both their SOA knowledge and experience, helping them to meet the skill shortage being created by accelerated enterprise adoption of SOA. It also serves as an online community for sharing best practices and collective problem solving.

SOA Master Class Online, which can be found at www.SOAMasterClass.com, is sponsored by webMethods, Inc. (NASDAQ: WEBM) in conjunction with leading SOA analyst firm ZapThink. It is also being supported by a number of additional contributors, including recognized SOA Masters David Linthicum of the Linthicum Group and Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors.

“SOA isn’t a specific product, but rather, a highly-disciplined approach for improving corporate and IT agility. As such, it needs to be learned and practiced over time,” said Miko Matsumura, vice president, webMethods, Inc. “This reality is creating a real shortage of experienced, knowledgeable architects capable of driving SOA success within their organization. SOA Master Class Online seeks to address this situation with targeted resources for rapidly closing the knowledge gap that currently exists.”

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, said, “One of the single biggest trends that ZapThink sees for 2007 is the dramatic shortage of qualified architects for SOA implementation. Our participation in SOA Master Class Online as well as our Licensed ZapThink Architect program are steps in the right direction.”

SOA Mastery: Managing Outcomes

The role of enterprise architects and related IT professionals has grown significantly with the emergence of SOA. With services encapsulating distinct business functions, the consequences of their decisions have increased significantly, creating a greater need for broader business understanding. At the same time, SOA’s more granular and dynamic model requires a more hands on approach as well as far greater forethought to the interrelationships and interdependencies of the underlying people, processes and technologies. As a result, a more strategic and disciplined approach is required to succeed with SOA.

In pursuing this SOA mastery, the SOA Master Class curriculum focuses on providing practitioners with the ability to move from the tactical – service orchestration – to the strategic – managing outcomes. Inherent within this approach is delivering the uniformity, consistency and measurability that are required to ensure that services meet consumer’s preconditions and expectations.

Inside the SOA Master Class Online

The SOA Master Class Online establishes a social network that gives SOA practitioners, architects and evaluators a wide range of vendor-neutral curricula and content as well as clearly-labeled vendor information, including product demonstrations and downloadable evaluations.

The site includes webinars and video content, syndicated blogs and discussion forums, and interaction with SOA masters. Every topic on the site has integrated functions such as social book-marking, RSS feeds, and an online SOA glossary.

Curricula topics include SOA Foundation and SOA Governance. These classes provide insight into creating the business case for SOA adoption, defining the organizational structure for success with SOA, and defining the technology requirements for establishing an incremental path to SOA. In addition to the best practices for successful SOA adoption, the following topics will be covered:

SOA Foundation – Basic Definitions and Reference Architecture from a vendor-neutral perspective.

SOA Governance - Detailed walkthrough of SOA-specific governance concepts, practices and implementations.

Additional resources available to the SOA Master Class Online community include white papers, analyst research, case studies, live events, reviews, blueprints, evaluation guides, wiki’s, FAQs, and more.

About webMethods, Inc.

webMethods (Nasdaq: WEBM) provides business integration software to integrate, assemble and optimize available IT assets to drive business process productivity. webMethods delivers an innovative, enterprise-class business integration platform that incorporates proven integration technology with next generation capabilities into one interoperable set of tools that delivers a unique combination of efficiency, agility and control. webMethods combines industry leadership with a zealous commitment to customers to deliver tangible business value to more than 1,500 global customers. webMethods is headquartered in Fairfax, Va., with offices throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Japan. More information about the company can be found at www.webMethods.com.

About ZapThink, LLC

Founded in October 2000, ZapThink, LLC (http://www.zapthink.com) is an IT advisory and analysis firm that provides trusted advice and critical insight into the architectural and organizational changes brought about by the movement to XML, Web Services and Service Orientation. We provide our three target audiences of IT vendors, service providers and end-users a clear roadmap for standards-based, loosely coupled distributed computing -- a vision of IT meeting the needs of the agile business. ZapThink is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. Its customers include Global 1000 firms and emerging businesses.

The webMethods name and logo are registered trademarks of, and webMethods Fabric is a trademark of, webMethods, Inc. All other marks mentioned are trademarks or service marks of their respective companies.