An authoritative InfoWorld study confirms what you’ve probably already guessed from talking to your fellow architects: SOA has achieved mainstream acceptance. In the past year, enterprise-wide SOA deployments have doubled, and so has confidence that SOA will deliver promised benefits. Almost 80 percent of companies surveyed consider SOA a top priority for the next five years.

The survey also reveals that BEA is the number-one vendor being considered for SOA solutions and services. And now, with the acquisition of Fuego, BEA is the only company to offer architects a unified SOA-based platform to integrate business processes, applications, and legacy environments.

The title of the survey says it all: From Pilot to Payoff: Service-Oriented Architecture Hits its Stride. Whether you’re still assessing SOA, starting a pilot, or rolling out SOA enterprise-wide, set your sights on the payoff and move ahead. BEA can help you every step of the way.

The survey of InfoWorld subscribers confirmed that SOA is undergoing rapid growth throughout the industry, with increased demand for architectural services as companies move through the stages of planning, development, and deployment. This brief article, written by Cliff Booth, VP of enterprise architecture at BEA, highlights BEA’s new SOA services offerings and explains how they address the trends and challenges identified by the InfoWorld survey results.

BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform—now available in a new version (2.1)—is designed to help SOA architects automate the service-enabling of data to build composite applications. New support for Microsoft ADO.NET provides tooling and runtime support for transparent interoperability with .NET applications, enabling access and update of multiple back-end data sources through the ADO.NET standard.

The March 16th edition of Network Computing magazine evaluates eight major vendors’ enterprise service bus (ESB) offerings. BEA AquaLogic Service Bus emerged as the best-in-show, earning the coveted Editor’s Choice award for its “awesome Web-based orchestration environment and elegant monitoring and reporting features.” Awesome and elegant? Sounds like you should check it out for yourself.

Establishing governance over each phase of the service lifecycle is essential to achieving the benefits of SOA. You need to establish, implement, and enforce policies in order to ensure compliance with the standards and objectives of your business at every stage, from design to runtime. To provide you with more information, BEA is offering a white paper, Service Lifecycle Governance: Timely policies and enforcement help companies reap the full benefits of SOA. Also, in a live Webinar on April 19, IDC analyst Sandy Rogers and BEA’s chief AquaLogic architect Paul Patrick will help put you on track for SOA success by explaining why service lifecycle governance is essential and how to achieve it.