SOALayers is a comprehensive SOA platform designed to assemble, manage and govern composite enterprise applications. It enables business process composition, integration, governance and policy management, and SOA infrastructure management.

The platform delivers its capabilities using three components - SOAIntegrator, SOADirector, and SOAStore. SOAIntegrator facilitates process, service and data integration, including human workflow automation. SOAStore provides design time SOA infrastructure and metadata management across artifacts like process definitions, schemas, access control rules and business policies. SOADirector enables runtime governance and policy enforcement for increased business process visibility and traceability.

As a platform, SOALayers has a Studio to build composite applications and an enterprise service bus (ESB) for integration, mediation and loose coupling. Enterprise and inter-enterprise services are wired using a process server and a business rules engine for greater flexibility in adopting policy changes rapidly. Process automation is extended to human workflows to support requirements like reviewing, approving, escalating, and exception/error handling.

SOADirector, a component of SOALayers, sits between service providers and service consumers to gather message data and enforce policy on every transaction to provide unprecedented visibility and control. SOADirector is an enterprise-class SOA management and governance product that enables users to secure, govern and manage web services and business processes. It is positioned between the service consumer and service provider, and gathers message data and enforces policy on every transaction to provide unprecedented visibility and control. It provides runtime governance, policy management, and business process visibility and traceability.

SOAStore, another key component of SOALayers, brings a JAXR compliant registry/repository management solution to support the entire SOA lifecycle from design, development through pilot and production, enabling better control of the SOA infrastructure. It allows visual creation of a flexible hierarchy of organizations, departments and users and associated roles and groups and defines access control policies. SOAStore also supports approval workflows for artifacts

While integrating services, SOALayers delivers mediation and enterprise capabilities like load balancing, throttling, failover, security, content based routing, transformation, identify propagation, reliable messaging and transactions.

Almost all relevant standards are supported such as JBI, BPEL 1.1 & 2.0, SCA, SDO, XForms, JAXR, XSLT, XPath, XQuery, WS-Security, SAML and other WS-* standards such as WS-RM, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy leading to interoperability with other products and platforms.

SOAMatrix Studio provides Eclipse based intuitive designer for business process composition and integration. The native business process execution language (BPEL) engine helps in building composite applications as well as human workflows. Business process automation and integration is facilitated through interfaces at various tiers such as User Interface, Business Logic and data.

SOAMatrix process manager enables monitoring, management and administration of processes and process instances using easy-to-use web console. Business Rules Engine captures business policies and enables flexibility and agility in adopting policy changes.

SOAMatrix Studio extends to human workflow automation to deal with process requirements such as review, approval, exception handling, or error notification. Human workflow automation is performed using web console, email, SMS or IVRS. It provides visibility and facilitates audit of actions taken through real time notification.

It is a standards-based platform supporting BPEL 1.1 & 2.0, SCA, SDO, XQuery, XSLT and XForms standards, to name a few.

SOAWorld Magazine’s “SOA World Magazine Readers’ Choice Awards”
SOA World Magazine announced that nominations are now open for the SOA World Magazine Readers' Choice Awards, which recognize excellence in the software, solutions, or services provided by the industry's top vendors. SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards, also known as the "Oscars of the Software Industry," has been one of the most prestigious industry award programs for more than a decade. This year's SOA awards will be given in 19 categories and the award-winning products and services will be selected by SOA World Magazine readers. Winners will be announced at the SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East, June 23-24 in New York City.

Service-oriented architectures have evolved over the past few years out of the original vision of loosely coupled Web services replacing constrained, stovepiped applications throughout enterprise IT. Every major enterprise technology vendor today has developed its own SOA strategy, supported by innumerable mid-size companies and start-ups offering specific SOA aspects or entire solutions.

Nominated Products and Services by Category: 

• Best App Server
• Best Automation Tool
• Best BPM Engine
• Best Framework
• Best IDE
• Best Integration Tool
• Best Legacy Adapter
• Best Open Source SOA Tool
• Best Portal Platform
• Best Security Solution
• Best SOA or XML Site
• Best SOA or XML Training
• Best SOA Platform
• Best SOA Testing Tool
• Best SOA Tool
• Best SOA/Web Services Book
• Best Web Services Utility
• Best XML Database
• Best XML Parser

SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 Sponsors
In 2007, SOA World Conference & Expo was sponsored by the world’s leading SOA companies including Active Endpoints, BEA Systems, Laszlo Systems, Nexaweb, TIBCO Software, WSO2, IBM, Parasoft, webMethods, Sybase, B-hive, iTKO, Managed Methods, Mellanox Technologies, Nastel, NextAxiom, RingCube, Two Roads Professional Resources, Web Age Solutions, Solstice Software, Fiorano Software, iTKO, Layer 7 Technologies, PushToTest, Ruby on Gears, Farata Systems, Tenfold, Thinstall, Trivera Technologies, BZMedia, Extension Media, GoingToMeet, ITtoolbox, Methods & Tools, SDTimes, Software Test & Performance, TechTracker Media, ZapThink, OASIS, and SOA Consortium.