I like coincidences. I came in this morning to an article in the November issue of Midrange Computing that had come in through one of my daily news searches. The article, FAQ on SOA is authored by Alex Nubla and covers a ton of stuff on SOA in midrange environments and a ton of stuff about SOA in general. It’s a good read if you’re at all interested in SOA. I almost wish one of my regular authors had written it, but I guess you can’t win them all. If nothing else, it’s nice to see IONA get a quick shout out when Alex talks about the work being done on the Service Component Architecture or SCA specification. I’d also like to point out that when Alex says,
An ESB must eliminate the consumer's need to deal with upgrades and load balancing between instances of specific services (e.g., the consumer invokes a service, not realizing that there may be many instances). It is uncertain that today's ESB delivers all these capabilities.– I can say with confidence that IONA’s Artix is at least one ESB that can.
But I digress, and have gotten away from the whole coincidence thing that begins the post. To get back on track, and to explain that whole coincidence thing, this morning we issued a press release talking about how we’re partnering with LANSA to help companies the are running mission-critical applications in midrange environments take advantage of SOA in multi-technology IT environments. SOA, done right, is a great way to achieve greater ROI on existing IT assets. Our work with LANSA helps customers achieve that goal for System i environments.