SOA Consortium Declares its Mission a Success
Will continue SOA advocacy as part of combined BPM/SOA Consortium

Needham, MA, USA – October 5, 2009 – The SOA Consortium™, which began in early 2007 with a goal of helping the Global 1000 successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010, is declaring success and evolving to focus on optimizing business processes as part of a new organization, the BPM/SOA Consortium, which is under the umbrella of the Business Ecology™ Initiative (BEI). For more information on BEI, please visit http://www.business-ecology.org; for more information on SOA Consortium, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org. 

The SOA Consortium began with just four sponsors and seven participants. The organization has included more than eight sponsors, including Cisco, HP, IBM Corporation, Layer 7 Technologies, MegaPractical, NEC Sphere, SPARX Systems and Sun Microsystems, Inc. and more than 100 member organization participants. Several thousand people have attended SOA Consortium meetings, listened to podcasts of SOA Consortium expert guest speakers, downloaded whitepapers and presentations, submitted SOA case studies to the SOA Consortium / CIO magazine Case Study Competition, tuned into the SOA Insights blog, and attended co-branded SOA Consortium tracks at major industry events.

“When the SOA Consortium began, SOA was more of a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, we see corporations large and small using the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies,” said Richard Mark Soley, executive director, SOA Consortium. “As we move forward in the drive towards Business Ecology, the combined BPM/SOA Consortium will continue to engage with the business community to show how SOA can be a valuable part of their business optimization efforts.”

According to Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst W. Roy Schulte, “the term ‘SOA’ was coined by Gartner, and Gartner published the first reports on it in 1996. However, widespread mainstream adoption only appeared after 2005. SOA is a durable change in application architecture, like the relational database and graphical user interface. It is the natural evolution of distributed computing — it is distributed computing done right. SOA is already the dominant architectural style for business applications. Virtually all CIOs are somewhere on the road to SOA, either starting or far along. SOA principles are timeless; no replacement is in sight.”

The SOA Consortium will be continuing its advocacy efforts as part of the new BPM/SOA Consortium, which also ties in with the Business Ecology™ Initiative. The Business Ecology Initiative is focused on erasing the constraining lines between business and Information Technology (IT) so that IT becomes a ubiquitous, integral and vital asset to the company and leads decision-making, structural change and enterprise-wide quality initiatives, drives efficiency and revenue, and provides measurable, clear return on investment.

SOA takes a technology-based approach to creating an architecture that supports the capturing of business processes and extending these for new capabilities while BPM takes a process management approach that may or may not include technology. Business and IT need to forge a closer relationship, so the new advocacy group will be focused on helping organizations combine the technically oriented aspects of SOA with the business focus of Business Process Management (BPM). Together they can create an environment that brings together the technology requirements (an architecture to support a service oriented approach to process) and the business management of these processes to support Business Ecology.

The BPM/SOA Consortium is already holding meetings as part of three-day BEI events co-located at OMG Technical Meetings. The next BPM/SOA Consortium event will take place in Long Beach, Calif. on December 8-10, 2009 with the theme of “BPM and SOA in the Cloud.” Organizations interested in joining the new BPM/SOA Consortium should contact Ken Berk, ken.berk@omg.org or +1-781-444 0404.

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About The BPM/SOA Consortium
The BPM/SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses in the successful adoption of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods and technologies. The BPM/SOA Consortium is an important piece of Business Ecology™, which has the purpose of optimizing the business processes of an organization while maintaining and extending business capabilities for suppliers and customers. The BPM/SOA Consortium is the continuation of the journey in business / IT alignment efforts that began with SOA.

Founding enterprise members of the BPM/SOA Consortium include Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Sponsors include Appian, IBM Corporation, MegaPractical and SPARX Systems, Inc. Participants include Fortune 1000 corporations, major government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Any organization may join the BPM/SOA Consortium. The BPM/SOA Consortium is managed by OMG™. For more information, please visit www.omg.org/consortiums. 

About The SOA Consortium
The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. SOA Consortium founding enterprise members include Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Sponsors are HP, IBM Corporation, MegaPractical, NEC Sphere and SPARX Systems. Participants include Fortune 1000 corporations, major government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Any organization may join the SOA Consortium. The SOA Consortium is managed by OMG.

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

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