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Focuses on the efforts of different enterprises in the U.S. to implement a Web service- oriented architecture (SOA). SOA vision; Tools to help developers design and build service-oriented architectures; Security protocols required by service-oriented architectures. INSET: Six Tips for SOA Design.

This article presents an interview of two executives from hosted applications or on-demand software service providers. Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.corn, elucidated his expectations for the hosted-application paradigm. Benioff thinks that the resurgence of interest in the hosted model was driven by exciting feature of the on-demand model. He added that the hosted model offers a whole breadth of opportunity for the customer to be more successful than ever before, using a whole new model at very low costs and very easy to use. Yet, chief information officers must not be worried because their job is going to be more strategic and more about finding what right thing to do for the business, and less about managing databases. Meanwhile, Grand Central Communications CEO Halsey Minor extolled the virtues of sharing. Minor said that enterprises need to change the way they consume applications. Consider spending $100 million on an enterprise software and get nothing back. Sifting to the hosted or on-demand application reduces this risk and the costs. As for the services of Grand Central, Minor said that there is no upfront on the cost of its platforms. He pointed out that theirs is the only platform that lets clients share their Internet protocol.

The article looks at how Merrill Lynch implemented Service-Oriented Legacy Architecture, a Web services initiative that reduced their information technology overhead since 2000. The objective of the project, which was headed by the company's vice president Jim Crew, was to build applications that leveraged not just the data but also the applications on the mainframe. Thus, Crew and his team used X4ML and made it part of Merrill Lynch's service-oriented architecture. Since then, the team has helped create Web services using a collection of Internet technologies like XML and SOAP to make operations available to programmers. The programmers then can create new applications in modern environments including Java from Sun Microsystems.

BEA announced its BEA Project Sierra named, Liquid Computing, at the company's 2004 eWorld conference. An amalgam of current and future BEA technologies centering on Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), Liquid Computing is basically the company's answer to the On Demand initiative of IBM. In other words, Liquid Computing, a vision of an SOA-based enterprise application infrastructure that will dynamically adapt to shifting business demand, is primarily a marketing concept. Not that technology-driven BEA has any shortage of interesting stuff to back up its vision. One week before eWorld, the company unveiled its Beehive Project, an open source implementation of the run-time container underlying WebLogic Workshop. The eWorld show also saw the formal announcement of Alchemy, a collection of technologies for mobile application development and deployment, and Quicksilver, a Web services-based enterprise services bus. Last but not least, a new Process Edition of WebLogic Server will draw on the platform's integration capabilities to enable composite application development. The problem for BEA is threefold. First, Liquid Computing's exaltation of SOA may be right but with IBM and Microsoft in the game, their technology sounds imitative. Second, with the exception of WebLogic Server Process Edition, none of the technologies announced at eWorld has a definite ship date. More difficult is that slumping licenses and stock value have put BEA under pressure and raised expectations that eWorld could not meet.