If you listen to industry discussion of service-oriented architecture (SOA), you are likely to get the impression that SOA is best thought of as a technical approach for application integration. The reality is that SOA is much more.

It's been a little hard of late to find references to SOA (service-oriented architecture), the buzz-phrase that once saturated the IT industry but in recent years has succumbed to "cloud computing." But SOA remains alive and relevant, according to a new Forrester Research report.

Open-source data integration vendor Talend is expanding its footprint into SOA (service-oriented architecture), announcing Wednesday that it has purchased Sopera, developer of an open-source ESB (enterprise service bus) and other technologies. Terms were not disclosed.

SOA is set for a comeback according to analyst company, Burton. Nearly two years ago, it was a Burton analyst, Anne Thomas Manes, who proclaimed that SOA was dead but it appears that reports of its demise have been exaggerated.

Roger Sessions, CTO of ObjectWatch and an expert in software architecture, argues that the increasing complexity of our IT systems will be our undoing.  In fact, he just recently got a patent for a methodology that helps deal with complex IT systems. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Sessions to get his take on the extent of the problem and possible solutions.

When it comes to new security issues, the security team for the Firefox browser have the new version of the Web HyperText Markup Language, HTML5, foremost on the mind.

Open source data management company, Talend, has pulled together its data integration, data quality and master data management (MDM) products into one integrated release. The company said that Talend 4.0 would offers users higher productivity and lower operational costs.

Google's enterprise division is hosting several hundred CIOs on Monday at its headquarters, where it will unveil enhancements to its Docs office suite, including a revamped code base.

Adopting more service-orientated architecture (SOA) products are just some ways business software vendor, Infor, is trying to achieve its goals this year despite stiff competition from SAP and Oracle. Senior vice-present for global strategy, Rick Parker, met up with JULIA TALEVSKI to discuss what role the channel has to play in Infor’s plans, the significance of SOA and how the market is shaping up.

Not too long ago, IT organizations turned to service-oriented architecture primarily as a way to integrate enterprise applications. But now large companies are using SOA to create components that can be combined and reused as services across multiple applications.

SOA is an idea, not a technology.

Many organizations are embracing SOA as a way to increase application flexibility, make integration more manageable, lower development costs, and better align technology systems to business processes. The appeal of SOA is that it divides an organization's IT infrastructure into services, each of which implements a business process consumable by users and services.

Boston Scientific wants to tear down barriers that prevent product developers from accessing the research that went into its successful medical devices so that they can create new products faster. But making data too easily accessible could open the way to theft of information potentially worth millions or billions of dollars. It's a classic corporate data privacy problem.

September 2008 will certainly go down as one of the blackest months in Wall Street history. Venerable financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG abruptly vanished or were radically overhauled. Investors lost loads of money -- in some cases, fortunes -- and ordinary taxpayers are now finding themselves funding an industry bailout that could cost a staggering US$700 billion, perhaps even more.

SOA may have seemed the savior of bad software architecture and poor development project planning, but the reality is that it's a complex and difficult venture. Thus, the number of failed SOA projects is about equal to the successful ones. In other words, you have a 50 percent chance of failing, and the odds of failure are even greater if you work within a larger Global 2000 organization or within the government.