Vendor- and technology-neutral consortium The Open Group has released two new industry standards: SOA Reference Architecture (SOA RA) and the Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure Framework (SOCCI) that enable businesses to integrate with success fundamental elements of SOA and cloud computing into a offering or enterprise architecture.
SOA RA is a blueprint for creating and evaluating SOA offerings and SOCCI is the first cloud standard of The Open Group, which is the framework for the concepts and architectural building blocks necessary for infrastructures to support SOA and cloud initiatives.
In addition, The Open Group has released updates to The Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM), which gives organisations a common model for developing a roadmap for achieving the right level of service adoption to meet business objectives.
OSIMM makes use of proven best practices to allow consultants and IT practitioners to assess an organisation’s readiness and maturity level for adopting services in SOA offerings.
With SOA RA Standard, enterprise architects can now have a common language and approach for creating SOA offerings and the architecture provides a vendor-neutral approach to SOA that allows users, vendors and customers across lines of business to reduce misunderstandings through shared terminology, eliminating extra efforts when mapping architectural concepts across vendors.
SOCCI is developed by The Open Group SOA and Cloud Work Groups and is the realisation of an enabling framework of service-oriented components for infrastructure to be provided as a service in SOA offerings and the cloud.
Using SOCCI, organisations can incorporate cloud-based resources and services into their infrastructure for increased agility and scale and lower maintenance costs.
In addition, SOCCI details a set of common SOCCI elements and management building blocks for organisations to consider and identifies the synergies that can be realised through cohesive application of SOA and cloud-based principles.
The Open Group Interoperability director Chris Harding said in today’s global competitive marketplace it is imperative that business and IT drivers are aligned.
"Each of the three standards is vendor-neutral and helps an organisation of any size to design and implement the proper SOA and Cloud solutions for its business objectives," said Harding.
