JNetDirect provides software products for improving their customer's connectivity, integration, management and security to their data resources. Products include JDBC drivers, Business Intelligence, Database Management, Disaster Recovery/Backup solutions and Password Management applications. Below is a brief overview of some of these software applications. JDBC Drivers - Since 1999, JNetDirect database drivers have set the industry standard for performance and stability. Their JDBC drivers are deployed worldwide -- in virtually every conceivable Java configuration -- giving organizations unparalleled connectivity to their critical data sources.

There is uniform agreement that SOA holds great promise as a strategy for improving business agility, better aligning IT and the business, and increasing overall IT efficiency. Developing an SOA strategy has become a key issue for most large enterprises: CTOs in a 2007 McKinsey survey ranked SOA as their top strategic item.

TopQuadrant has announced the general availability of TopBraid Live 2.0, a semantic application deployment platform that simplifies the creation of web services to a 'click and connect' process. Users can connect data from RDF stores, relational databases, spreadsheets, email, RSS feeds, as well as data in HTML and XML formats, without the need to understand programming languages. A new Flex API creates graphical 'information spaces' as the output, which allow users to browse dynamic information by following graphical links.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of 'Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) Infrastructure Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, 2008 to 2014' to their offering. According to the report, IBM is the de-facto industry standard market leader in SOA. IBM dominates SOA with 64% of the market, the rest of market is divided between 12 other participants with measurable market share, none of whom have even been able to garner as much as 8% of the market.

SOA Software announced that it has acquired LogicLibrary, a SOA Repository and Governance vendor. This acquisition combines two recognized companies, creating a dominant SOA Governance company with an impressive customer base. SOA Software is positioned by Gartner in the leader's quadrant of the 'Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets, 2007' report. The Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets evaluated 18 vendors and summarizes the state of the market for SOA Governance. The company focuses on SOA Policy Governance and SOA Operational Governance with strong registry, policy management, and service management capabilities.

Adopting SOA is a lot like gardening. It takes time, skill, a lot of hard work, and the process can be messy and even a bit frustrating at times. I know you've probably heard tons of different analogies that attempt to put SOA and governance into everyday terms and I'm sure that growing the SOA 'garden' through governance won?t be the last.

SAP announced findings of a research effort conducted with the University of St. Gallen that show IT projects based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) improve software reusability, reduce operations cost and offer substantial process efficiencies. As SOA is currently undergoing mass adoption and establishing itself as a de facto technology standard for implementing software architectures for increased flexibility and simplified integration, organizations are looking for more economic justification for their initial SOA projects. The study focuses on the SOA business-value proof points that organizations are using to convey the benefits of an SOA strategy to decision makers.

SAP announced that it has delivered a complete accompaniment of service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies, ready-to-run services and comprehensive support offerings to help companies achieve additional business value and increased IT efficiencies. With SOA as the de facto market standard and mass adoption underway, customers can turn to SAP for a simplified, comprehensive option for executing a sound SOA strategy that delivers rapid value. The breadth of offerings from SAP addresses the full lifecycle of SOA projects -- from development to deployment and ongoing management -- making the transition to SOA easy and affordable. By taking advantage of hands-on guidance through SAP's methodology, customers can accelerate business network transformation.

SOA has come a long way from a concept to wide-scale adoption by the enterprise at multiple layers of IT. SOA implementation at the UI layer is the latest in SOA adoption trends. SOA has manifested itself in a number of flavors such as the creation of a rich user experience by using technology like AJAX, provisioning value-added services by mashing up data from multiple sources, community-based peer-to-peer interactions, creating collective intelligence, creating collaborative platforms often catering to a trusted community, and creating modular content-based sites.

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) can deliver tremendous value in flexibility, adaptability and cost savings. But SOA environments are complex by definition, with lots of loosely coupled components and a potentially vast combination of platforms, software, databases, applications and networks. One of the biggest challenges inherent in realizing the benefits of SOA is effectively managing all of these diverse components to ensure the high availability and performance of the applications running in them to meet crucial Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This session will explore Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines and offer practical insights into how CEP can be leveraged to enable rapid real-time problem correction and predictive problem prevention that is vital to successful SOA implementations.

Service orientation is one of the most popular trends of these recent years, but there are not any metrics on it. Hence you can not consume SOA in a project with a specific measuring. On the other side, Unified Process (especially RUP) has powerful abilities on such developments. In our discussion Chris Shayan is going to demonstrate that we can combine SOA and RUP with each other and finally make a Service Oriented Unified Process.

It seems that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) continues to be this year's hot buzzword, rather than a well-defined, meaningful and valuable part of the Enterprise Architecture landscape. Before the term fades away completely, perhaps we should agree what's valuable about the move to SOA and how to make the leap, and make the leap valuable. OMG's SOA Consortium is making great strides in defining SOA to be a valuable business strategy for business agility, taking advantage of Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management and other concepts; and the OMG itself is making headway on modeling standards for services (as opposed to yet another set of standards for moving bits around wires).

What is BPEL? What is XPDL? How are they different? What is the best use for each? What is BPMN, and why should I care? Which of these are primarily designed to help IT at a technical level, and which help an organization at a business level? Amongst the flurry of BPM and Web services standards that appear to overlap at times, there is a central core of important ones. This session, led by Keith Swenson, Fujitsu's Chief Architect and Co-Chair of the Workflow Management Coalition Technical Committee (WfMC), is aimed at lending clarity to the fuzzy world of BPM and Web services standards and at explaining the benefits of investing in standards-driven solutions.

This session will investigate what is happening out there in the world of Mobility that uses Services, some are calling this MOA (Mobile Oriented Architecture). We will also discuss architectures, application design & considerations for mobility

Adoption of federated identity technology has been slower than the hype might indicate, despite the maturity of standards such as SAML 2.0 and Web Services Security. This presentation examines the distinct business and technical identity management issues in both the commercial and user-centric spheres, and important catalysts to drive successful deployment.

I've worked for Fortune 500 companies engaged simultaneously in 50+ of IT projects as well as small companies with one or two products and I don't believe there is a need for any organization to have a full-time software architect. Once the modeling is done, it is the work of coding and testing that truly takes the full-time effort. Once underway, 100 hours a month of time is enough for any architect to respond to most needs of all ongoing projects.

In this wide-ranging interview with SYS-CON.com David Linthicum, CEO of StrikeIron, addresses the hot new Data Services trend and the all-important notion of enterprise mashups, which he pinpoints as the defining technology of the year ahead. 'I'm surprised people are paying me for this work, I'm having a blast,' quips Linthicum.

But that same virtualization is perhaps even more valuable in the performance lab, if you can apply serious load testing to it. The constraints of having a realistic environment and test data to test and develop against is holding these teams back from finding performance issues much earlier - so we can gauge SLAs (service levels) at the component level. And in SOA - where you are dealing with services and underlying systems that are distributed and constantly changing, replicating that whole environment is incredibly costly and time consuming.

IONA announced the latest release of Artix Data Services, an open and standards-based development tool for building model-driven data services, and a key component of IONA's Artix advanced SOA infrastructure suite. Artix Data Services shortens the data services development, test and maintenance lifecycle and improves the quality of data as it flows across heterogeneous environments.

Popular assumptions can often be dangerous. We will start by considering how the many unique architectural characteristics of SOA, such as loose-coupling, can actually be a two-edged sword affecting the requirements, nature and success of many important aspects of the architecture, especially runtime governance. In fact, the success of any SOA requires that one must gain an understanding of the true nature, performance characteristics and availability of the business transactions that flows in real-time through these highly distributed services and their supporting IT infrastructure. Similarly, security and governance usually play a critical role in the proper operation of a SOA. Although one may support these critical SOA functions using many different technologies and standards, there is no doubt that for most users today the popular WS-* standards will play a central role. We will conclude by considering how all of these standards might best work together to solve these real-world problems in your SOA. In the process, we will speculate upon some the strengths and weaknesses in the current Web services stack, the nature of the standards process and what trends might be most relevant to your own future success.

Exploring the boundaries between the Enterprise and the Internet, this talk focuses on Architectural approaches from the service pattern, process pattern and event pattern to help SOA practitioners understand topics such as Web 2.0, AJAX, SaaS, Social Networks and how they connect with the Enterprise. The emerging patterns of architecture can enable the savvy architect to empower their IT to embrace an accelerating vision of the network economy.

The success of SOA runs two ways. SOA serves as the catalyst for organizational change, yet an organization must be ready to embrace these new dimensions opened up by SOA. The latest survey data shows most organizations are just starting on their SOA journeys. Why do enterprises set out to build a Service Oriented Architecture, but end up with a 'Service Averse Architecture'? There are many promises being made about the potential of SOA these days, followed by disillusionment as these promises don't pan out. However, SOA is more than a single IT project or even a series of implementations. Rather, SOA represents a long-term change in thinking and management of all aspects of the enterprise. SOA not only decomposes technology into loosely coupled systems, but also decomposes organizations into 'loosely coupled businesses.' This session will look at the latest survey data on ways organizations are embracing service oriented architecture, and how far along the road most are from full-functioning SOA.

This session will illustrate how service-orientation brings about the ability for organizations to see changes in business processes reflected quickly in their business systems by discussing real-world applications of SOA as applied to supply-chain management.

Dramatic industry changes - including vendor consolidation, outsourcing and the growth of open source - highlight the need for a better way. When a SOA implementation costs too much, the culprit is often the old-fashioned, proprietary and expensive server or hub-based middleware. A better, distributed approach to SOA infrastructure can help reduce cost and increase the benefit of SOA implementation. This presentation includes an overview of the industry trends driving us toward SOA and explains why traditional middleware systems do not meet modern requirements as well as a distributed approach to SOA infrastructure.

'When we speak of enterprise mash-ups, composite applications and software as a service (SaaS), it's easy to forget that you actually need infrastructure behind the user experience to make it happen,' says Gordon Van Huizen in this exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan. SOA middleware is among the fastest growing segments of the software industry, Van Huizen notes, adding: 'I believe that the increased interest in Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications will drive the growth of middleware faster than EAI did.'

While SOA can deliver dramatic cost reduction of an organization's business operations, it is a complex, multidisciplinary undertaking, and therefore introduces significant risk. This session presents a list of the most important risk factors and ways to mitigate them BEFORE it is too late. The session will be of interest to anyone planning an SOA initiative, primarily CIOs, Technical Managers, Project Directors and Technical Architects.

Carl Icahn, the guy with the shotgun in Yahoo's back, has picked up a couple of friends to hand him bullets. Third Point LLC, a hedge fund, has picked up five million shares in Yahoo on its way perhaps to 10 million shares and is supporting Icahn's proxy battle to sell the joint to Microsoft, Reuters said. And Texas oil billionaire T Boone Pickens announced on CNBC that he bought 10 million shares and is supporting Icahn.

SAP announced plans for the release of SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management and SAP NetWeaver Business Rules Management. The addition of these planned capabilities will further establish SAP NetWeaver as the strategic platform of choice for customers that execute a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. The new tools from SAP are aimed to provide the business process flexibility needed to enable customers to turn strategic business insight into real-world execution. A vital part of SAP's robust platform offering, SAP NetWeaver allows IT organizations to drive more value by providing the agility to respond to requests from the business for new or adapted business processes. The addition of the planned capabilities will enable business process experts to design, model and execute new or adapted business processes without having to develop code. The SAP NetWeaver technology platform and its full set of capabilities allows companies to accelerate the consolidation of their IT landscapes, enabling them to enjoy new levels of the business process flexibility used to drive innovation and competitive advantage.

Open source has made significant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. There are many custom Enterprise Service Bus deployments waiting to be upgraded to a simple, open and affordable SOA integration platform. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments, with a focus on ESB, and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

Many organizations make the faulty assumption that SOA is a panacea that can, and should be, applied to every situation. The reality is that service orientation is not the right answer for every scenario. The expense of service orientation cannot always be recouped and, in some cases, service orientation can actually do more harm than good. In this talk, Kyle Gabhart will explore the subject of selective service orientation and how to go about effectively governing the service orientation of the enterprise.

SOA implementations are increasingly reliant on streams of data that are time-critical, reliably delivered and sourced from mixed infrastructures in a highly distributed environment. Data formats, delivery mechanisms, fault tolerance capabilities and stateful semantics embedded in data are often inadequately considered when architecting and implementing large scale real-time SOA applications. This talk will introduce several real-time data-centric technologies that specifically address the challenges of wide-scale, real-time data distribution, as well as how these technologies seamlessly integrate into existing SOA frameworks. Examples will be drawn from military and aerospace applications that are already seeing success with real-time, highly distributed SOA applications.

Managing Web Services in production is no easy task. Ensuring that services follow corporate security and SOA governance requirements, monitoring compliance with individual SLAs, preventing one client from degrading the performance of others and ensuring services built today will work in the future are a few of the challenges. Web service virtualization provides a separate layer that isolates business and operational rules, enabling you to quickly configure virtual Web services while enforcing business and operational policies. This services layer augments Web services management (WSM) tools and registries, making all the services in the enterprise more efficient and consistent.

As Service-Oriented Architectures gain ground, it becomes obvious that their performance is the key to their success. I'm going to briefly write about two sessions that I attended in JavaOne 2008. They outline two totally different approaches from two very different companies. You're going to see that a well performing SOA implementation requires considerable work and performance tuning expertise.

Even though 'Service' comes first in SCA (Service Component Architecture), SCA is a distributed component model. It's about designing components (and composites) rather than designing services. It doesn't feel like it was designed to build a SOA. It feels like its main goal was to define a distributed component model. And as we all know, the distributed component models failed in the past. I think SCA will too.

While SOA has traditionally had something of a data obsession. While the focus has been on service-enablement of structured and transactional data and processes, documents and document-centric processes have been conspicuously absent from the SOA agenda. With structured data in order, organizations are now beginning to take a closer look at the role of unstructured assets as part of SOA.

A round-up of the Service Oriented Architecture related themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 13th International Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Questions, it is said, focus our thinking. Some go so far as to say that it is 'better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.' And good questions, it is generally agreed, outrank easy answers. Here then is a round-up of some of the 'good questions' asked recently at SYS-CON.com, as part and parcel of our ongoing, 24 x 7 x 365 coverage of the interlocking worlds of technology and business.

IBM announced details of new identity software designed to help clients securely manage employee, partner and customer IT users and their access to company applications and information. The new release of IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager software further simplifies the sharing of data between trusted parties -- such as business partners or separately managed divisions within an organization -- with secure application integration and single-sign on technology. With it, users can sign-on to a corporate Web site once and then obtain seamless, secure access to applications both inside and outside of their IT network.

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and enhancing the user experience of consumers of the services becomes an important part in designing and implementing SOA. But if you decide to develop rich clients, you'll be facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .NET or experiment with such newcomers as AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX. While the Internet brings a lot of noise where 'it's cool' is the most popular definition, this presentation is an overview of what's out there on the enterprise RIA market. We'll talk about the pros and cons of using various techniques and technologies for the development of the front end for complex SOA distributed systems.