Press Release

OASIS Advances Standards to Simplify SOA Application Development

Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA) Member Section Forms

Boston, MA, USA; 11 April 2007 — OASIS, the international standards consortium, today announced the formation of the Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA) Member Section, a new initiative to advance standards that simplify Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) application development. Open CSA will promote the further development and adoption of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) families of specifications, which will be provided to the community on a Royalty Free basis.

SCA helps organizations more easily design and transform IT assets into reusable services that can be rapidly assembled to meet changing business requirements. SDO lets application programmers uniformly access and manipulate data from heterogeneous sources, including relational databases, XML data sources, Web services, and enterprise information systems.

Gartner analysts, Daniel Sholler, Jess Thompson, and Yefim V. Natis observed, "SCA is an ambitious initiative, intended to offer mainstream software projects an easy-to-use way to deploy consistently well-designed, multiplatform service-oriented business applications." In their 26 March 2007 report, Long-Awaited SCA Initiative Begins to Gain Momentum, the analysts note that, "This approach would simplify the design and deployment of services and establish a ‘transportable’ set of engineering skills for SOA design. [SCA would] enable many of the static analysis features that developers have come to expect in programming environments, but that have been absent in services (such as dependency analyses and type checking)."

Both SCA and SDO were created by the Open SOA Collaboration, an informal group of 18 software vendors. After successfully shepherding the specifications through their incubation phase, these vendors selected OASIS as the most effective venue for advancing SCA and SDO through the open standardization process.

"OASIS appreciates the work of the Open SOA Collaboration to see these specifications through their incubation stage and then contribute them into the open standards process," noted OASIS president and CEO, Patrick Gannon. "Advancing this work within OASIS will enable the SCA and SDO specifications to receive input from a broader international community of software developers, systems integrators, and users. The Open CSA Member Section will be able to coordinate the standardization of multiple specifications, provide education, and promote implementation in order to achieve the most extensive industry adoption of this work."

The Open CSA Member Section will oversee several new OASIS Technical Committees for the SCA and SDO families of specifications. Everyone is invited to participate in this work. Charters for these new Committees will be available in the coming weeks.

Members of the Open CSA Member Section include Active Endpoints, Avaya, BEA Systems, Hitachi, IBM, Oracle, Primeton, Progress Software, Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, SAP AG, SOA Software, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO, Xcalia, and others.

Support for Open CSA
Active Endpoints "Open CSA provides the infrastructure specifications that allow developers to transform a wide variety of IT assets into reusable services. We believe that the Open CSA work, combined with WS-BPEL, delivers tremendous value to organizations aiming to implement applications in a service-oriented architecture. We are pleased to participate in the Open CSA initiative," said Chris Keller, VP R&D, Active Endpoints, Inc.

BEA Systems "BEA is excited about the possibilities for this new member section, and we look forward to being involved in the development of high quality specifications that will be a true benefit to the software development community," said Michael Rowley, BEA Technical Director and Standards Architect.

Hitachi "Hitachi believes that the launch of the OASIS Open CSA Member Section could be a significant cornerstone of an SOA. Technologies included in Open CSA will enable much broader adoption of SOA, providing methods for the implementation of ‘services’ in more efficient ways. It is a great honor for us to be a part of these activities, and we intend to actively participate," said Takao Nakamura, Executive General Manager, Software Division, Hitachi Ltd.

IBM "We are delighted with the SCA and SDO submission to OASIS, and support the creation of the Open CSA Member Section to oversee their future development and stewardship. The adoption of SCA/SDO will provide the missing link between process and data in composite SOA application implementation. Our customers are enthusiastic about the capabilities of these specifications, which dramatically improve developers’ ability to create applications and solutions in an SOA style," said Karla Norsworthy, Vice President, IBM Software Standards, IBM Corporation.

Oracle "Oracle is excited to be a founding member of the OASIS Open CSA Member Section and to continue to help drive the development and adoption of the SCA/SDO specifications. With these specifications now becoming part of the open standards process, we look forward to working within the larger OASIS community to build consensus and deliver these important and comprehensive SOA standards to the industry," said Jeff Mischkinsky, director of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Web Services Standards, Oracle.

Primeton "The OASIS CSA Member Section is a new step toward a long term goal. We look forward to fruitful collaborations with other members for the improvement and adoption of SCA/SDO standards," said Chris Cheng, VP of Primeton Technologies.

Progress Software "Progress Software is pleased to be a founding supporter of the Open CSA effort, and to have the opportunity to help build what will become an important technology for the next generation of SOA developers. This effort dovetails nicely with our world-class integration, management, and mediation technologies, and we look forward to bringing significant advantages to SCA developers in our upcoming product releases. Standardizing the SCA framework in an open and collaborative forum like OASIS is an important step for these specifications," said Gordon Van Huizen, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Infrastructure Division, Progress Software.

Red Hat "Red Hat is pleased to help push SCA into the open standards process under OASIS and believes that the resulting work will be important for interoperable SOA foundations," said Mark Little, Director of Standards, Red Hat.

Rogue Wave Software "SCA and SDO standards are key to helping our customers adopt SOA without sacrificing their existing technology investments. With HydraSCA and HydraSDO, Rogue Wave Software has delivered scalable, high performance implementations of the SCA and SDO specifications. We look forward to working in the Open CSA group to continue to mature and evolve SCA and SDO," said Patrick Leonard, vice president of product development, Rogue Wave Software.

SAP AG "SCA and SDO are important technologies that will simplify service composition, increase composite application development productivity and help SAP customers achieve higher business agility. We are excited to have the opportunity to participate in the Steering Committee of the newly formed Open CSA Member Section and look forward to working with the OASIS community on the standardization of this important set of specifications," said Michael Bechauf, vice president of industry standards, SAP AG.

SOA Software "Open CSA provides an opportunity for advancing industry consensus in providing end-user organizations with a consistent approach to standards-based design, modeling, representation, lifecycle management and governance of composite services and their supporting architectures. Having explicit standards-based architectural support, along with an accompanying assembly-oriented SOA programming model for composite services, provides user organizations with choice, flexibility and predictability as they adopt compositional application models that enable the realization of business-driven IT value," said Frank Martinez, Executive Vice President, Product Strategy, SOA Software.

Sun Microsystems "Sun is pleased to join the OASIS Open CSA Member Section to lend our expertise in standards and component technologies to the direction of this work. Composition of services continues to be challenging for developers, and Sun believes that having richer, standardized metadata supporting this task can help to simplify software development for our customers," said Mark Hapner, Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

TIBCO "The formation of OASIS Open CSA is a significant milestone for the developers and vendors responsible for taking SOA forward within the industry. As one of the first vendors to market with an SCA-based service container for the enterprise (TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid), we understand the importance of supporting open standards as a foundation of service-oriented, event-driven enterprise architectures," said Matt Quinn, Vice President of Product Management and Strategy at TIBCO Software.

Additional information:
OASIS Open CSA Member Section: http://www.oasis-opencsa.org/
Open SOA Collaboration: http://www.osoa.org/

About OASIS:

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. The consortium produces open standards for Web services, security, e-business, and standardization efforts in the public sector and for application-specific markets. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. http://www.oasis-open.org

Press contact: Carol Geyer OASIS Director of Communications carol.geyer@oasis-open.org +1.978.667.5115 x209 (office) +1.941.284.0403 (mobile)