Contact:
Stephanie Covert
Object Management Group
+1-843-737 0637
info@soa-consortium.org

American Red Cross and Federal Signal Corporation Join SOA Consortium

Needham, MA, USA – April 30, 2007 – The SOA Consortium™ today announced that American Red Cross and Federal Signal Corporation have joined. The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000 successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. Founding sponsors are BEA Systems, Inc., Cisco, IBM Corporation, and SAP AG.

“SOA is an approach to business agility that enables higher interoperability and responsiveness within and between organizations. This is a key requirement for first responders, who are often responding from many different organizations and localities, and that need to be able to communicate and provide seamless support for communities in distress,” said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., executive director, SOA Consortium. “The SOA Consortium is delighted to welcome both a key vendor and high-profile user in this space to our community.”

“Federal Signal is excited about participating in the SOA Consortium with other leading organizations as Service Oriented Architecture emerges as a foundation for key cross-industry initiatives,” said Michael K. Wons, VP and CIO, Federal Signal Corporation. “Federal Signal is focused on improving public safety, security, and well-being around the world and has begun implementing SOA-based interoperable communications for first responders."

The SOA Consortium mission, strategies and tactics center on the following premises:

• Service-oriented architecture adoption is a key enabler for the 21st century enterprise

• Achieving the benefits of service-oriented architecture requires significant changes for both IT and business executives

• Service-oriented architecture is a business agility story, not just an IT integration story

• Enterprise SOA practitioners would greatly benefit from a vibrant practitioner community to drive local, business-driven, SOA success, and to spur broader enterprise, and industry-wide, SOA adoption.

The SOA Consortium is holding its inaugural European meeting June 27-28 at the Crowne Plaza Brussels City Centre in Brussels, Belgium. Organizations interested in joining the SOA Consortium and attending the meeting should visit the website, http://www.soa-consortium.org or email info@soa-consortium.org for more information.

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About The SOA Consortium
SOA Consortium founding enterprise members include Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Founding sponsors are BEA Systems, Inc., Cisco, IBM Corporation, and SAP AG. Participants in the consortium to date include: Avis Budget Car Rental, Bank of America, CellExchange, Inc., Integration Consortium, HP, Object Management Group, and WebEx Communications. Any organization may join the SOA Consortium. The SOA Consortium is managed by the Object Management Group.

For more information, please visit http://http://www.soa-consortium.org or email info@soa-consortium.org. 

Note to editors: SOA Consortium, OMG and Object Management Group are trademarks of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.