Posted by Jignesh Shah, VP Business Infrastructure Products & Solutions, Software AG.

Twitter: @jshah0209

Cox Communications presented what’s behind their SOA success story on the SOA Rock Stars webinar series. Cox is the third-largest cable company in the United States and is known for its customer service. Bruce Beeco, who introduced SOA at Cox in 2002, described how SOA has helped Cox improve its customer service by opening up new channels and providing a consistent experience across all of them.

Posted by Matt Durham, VP Market Development, Software AG.

I am @matthewdurham on Twitter.

On April 19 Gartner published “Market Share: Application Infrastructure and Middleware Software, Worldwide, 2009” (membership required for access). In the report, Gartner showed pretty healthy year-over-year growth of about 8% for the middleware market (which they call “Application Infrastructure and Middleware”, or AIM). It’s great that the report shows that Software AG is about 12% bigger than TIBCO in this market and that Software AG grew about 9% in product while TIBCO shrank by a bit more than 1% (or grew by a bit more than -1%?!?). Software AG is also the largest SOA Governance vendor and in the top five in BPMS, ESB and B2B software (and ahead of TIBCO in all of those).

Posted by Jignesh Shah, VP SOA Product Management & Marketing, Software AG.

Twitter: @jshah0209

In his key note address at this year’s Gartner AADI Summit, Jeff Schulman, Vice President, Gartner, compelled everyone to focus on SOA Governance. He described SOA Governance as the key to adopting SOA and realizing its benefits. Further, he felt that SOA Governance was do or die and without governance one might as well flush their SOA investments down the drain and update their resumes! While this statement may sound a bit over the top, it simply emphasizes the fact that it is not possible to benefit from SOA without SOA Governance.

Posted by Jignesh Shah, VP SOA Product Management & Marketing, Software AG.

Last month I met several customers at Software AG Tech Fairs hosted in Boston, Chicago and DC. At each event, we conducted a special session to get feedback on our ideas for the future and what customers might expect from us. One of the topics was support for additional WS-* standards. Across the board, this topic drew blank stares, shrugs and an occasional cynical remark like – “the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from”. The latest feedback from our Toronto event is more of the same – no interest. This lack of interest is a huge shift from just a couple of years ago when WS-* standards were highly discussed and hotly debated.

Posted by Jignesh Shah, VP SOA Product Management & Marketing, Software AG.

SOA adoption continues to take root and grow at many organizations. But there is still much misinformation about the concept and how to best apply it. The situation is made worse by continued theoretical and philosophical debates about SOA. Now, a group of SOA practitioners and thought-leaders is attacking this distraction head on by creating an SOA Manifesto. The group has created an explanation of SOA and its guiding principles available at http://www.soa-manifesto.org/.