Last week we got flooded with requests to extend the deadline for our Products of the Year Awards submissions. Normally we’d have taken a “no soup for you” stance on this, but when the requests topped the dozen mark we figured we should grant an extension.

Now you’ve got until February 15 to fill out the nomination form. It will push back the announcement of winners until March, but we believe this will be the most comprehensive set of awards handed out in the SOA space and we wanted to make sure absolutely everyone gets a chance to submit.

For those of you who don’t know, we have eight categories:

1. Service design and modeling (including BPM)
2. Service assembly and integration (ESB, orchestration)
3. Service performance (testing, QA)
4. SOA runtime management
5. Data services/integration (including BI)
6. SOA security
7. SOA governance (including registry/repository)
8. Composite application assembly (portal, Ajax, RIA)

Products need to have been released between Dec. 1, 2006 and Nov. 30, 2007. You can check the nomination form for more details, though we highly recommend you explain how the product enables SOA and adheres to the principles of service orientation in your entry.

Let’s face it, service-oriented architecture is boring. I mean, with all that planning and attention to detail and consistency. Maybe that appeals to the small percentage of people out there who lead highly organized lives, but for most humans in your app dev shop the efficiency and better business productivity of SOA isn’t going to set off any internal whistles.

For them the selling point on SOA is that if you get organized over here then you can do some cool, new stuff over there. It’s a tradeoff. You want to do some fantastic enterprise mashup? Guess what? That’s not going to happen until you’ve got loosely coupled applications with easily digested data. It’s the adult equivalent of having to eat your vegetables before you get dessert.

Anyway, we know that plenty of companies out there want to pursue rich Internet and/or composite applications. What we don’t know is how far along you are with that work. So we put together a RIA and composite apps survey to get a better sense of your progress in this area and to find out what sorts of pain points you’re experiencing. It’s quick and easy to take and we aren’t requiring you to provide any intimate personal information (seriously, we don’t want your DNA).

If we know more about your interests and concerns in the Web 2.0, we can better focus our coverage on your needs. Whether you’re working on an internal portal, a trading application or a cool Web site like BreakThru Radio, or even if that’s what your company would like to be doing, we want to know about your RIA experience.

We know you’re out there, looking to push the application envelope, yearning to turn all this organization into something creative. Make sure you chime in on the survey and it will help align our coverage.

For the past two years, we at SearchSOA.com have been told regularly by our members (numbering 450,000+ these days), that you need help with governance. Apparently the mechanics of running an SOA is one of the biggest challenges users face.

That’s no surprise, the reuse, performance, management and ownership aspects of SOA are, literally, a sea change for a lot of IT organizations. This is business as unusual.

With that in mind, we’ve put together our Pragmatic SOA Governance Seminar, a free one-day event which covers the design time, runtime and business aspects of SOA governance. The material is geared toward key decisions makers in your IT organization - CTOs, enterprise architects and app dev managers. The seminar will go beyond theory and focus on actionable steps you can take to achieve SOA governance right now.

The dates and locations of the seminars are:

• February 21, San Jose, CA
• February 26, Reston, VA
• February 28, Mt. Laurel, NJ

Those interested in attending need to submit a registration form or call Lauren Nickerson at 781-657-1782.

One of the leading lights in the SOA community, Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, will be presenting the main sessions. In addition there will be a user case study presented in each of the three cities: Transunion in San Jose, the Department of the Interior in Reston and Synovus Financial in Mt. Laurel. Each of these users has gone through the hard work of implementing an enterprise-wide SOA and will share their hands-on experiences about best and worst practices when it comes to SOA governance.

We’ve taken pains to make sure this seminar won’t be the standard boilerplate presentation of SOA governance with some vendors then saying all you need to do is buy Product X and your governance needs will be solved. These events will identify specific governance pain points and offer up sensible solutions. At SearchSOA.com we hold ourselves to a high standard. Just as we take pains to give you independent, in-depth of SOA-related news (instead of repackaged press releases), we’ve made sure that you can walk away from this seminar with a laundry list of SOA governance action items.

Oracle Corp. finally came up with an offer BEA Systems Inc. couldn’t refuse, but the sale is merely a prelude to a pile of “now what?” questions.

The next year in the application development software space will be shaped by this deal. How will BEA fit underneath the Oracle umbrella? What does this mean for open vs. proprietary tooling? Will BEA open new SOA arenas to Oracle or will this create an opportunity for competitors to win business as the Oracle-BEA assimilation takes place? Will SAP react? Will Microsoft react? Will IBM react?

I could go on all day, but I suspect you get the point: Oracle has agreed to buy BEA and the fallout promises to be massive.

Even though this deal has seemed imminent for months, the media and analyst community is trying to sort out the rationale behind it. Over at ZDNet, Larry Dignan’s blog entry notes “Ellison added that BEA will allow Oracle to instantly become a leader in messaging and ‘adds scale to our middleware business.’”

The Eye on Oracle blog from SearchOracle.com speaks with Forrester analyst Ray Wang, who says, “We expect accelerated consolidation along key battle grounds of middleware platforms such as Master Data Management, business intelligence, portals, business process management, and other information management tools. Don’t expect the competitors of BEA to sit still.”

Matt Asay at CNET flogs the conventional wisdom and asks if Oracle’s platform play will drive users toward open source offerings.

On his blog at SpringSource, Rod Johnson speculates that “the Oracle application server, OC4J, is history and Oracle will focus on driving WebLogic Server.” Yet that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Here’s some of the other seemingly competitive products that need to be rationalized:

• Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, BEA AquaLogic Service Bus
• Oracle BPA Suite, BEA AquaLogic BPM
• Oracle Portal, BEA WebLogic Portal
• Oracle Web Services Manager, BEA AquaLogic SOA Management
• Orace Data Integrator, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform
• Oracle JDeveloper 10g, BEA Workshop

That last one is a real sticky wicket in that BEA built Workshop on the open source Eclipse IDE, while JDeveloper is still a fully proprietary offering. Where does the tooling go? Since Oracle bought BEA, you’d have to think this doesn’t bode well for BEA’s open tooling approach. If so, maybe Asay is onto something, maybe this is the end of the “commercial open source” path BEA was trying to navigate.

How well Oracle assimilates BEA and what decisions it makes about mixing and matching the two product lines could either give rise to an application development titan or send customer scurrying for alternatives. One thing it probably can’t afford to do is repeat what it’s done with the 2007 Hyperion acquisition, namely make a big money purchase and then remain mum on how it will fit long term into the Oracle Fusion product line. Hyperion was a complimentary acquisition, bringing business intelligence into the Oracle family. It can stand alone for a while. There’s too much redundancy with BEA for Oracle not to produce a fairly clear roadmap of how it all fits together.

Could growing fears of an economic slowdown in the U.S. be good news for service-oriented architecture?

While it’s morbid to consider, the answer might be yes. While most companies don’t have an operating SOA in place at the moment, many do (anywhere from 20 to 33% dependent on which poll you happen to be reading). If the U.S. economy takes a nap for a few quarters and money for new projects becomes tight, then SOA will be handed a golden opportunity to flash the agility it has long promised.

Can the SOA vanguard connect to new partners, assemble new applications and create new efficiencies without requiring piles of money be spent on new software? If it can, then it stands to gain a significant advantage over its competitors, who may need to shelve good ideas until they can afford to implement them. It really is the ultimate test for whether you’ve turned your app dev efforts into a profit center rather than a cost center.

In fact, recent events are making ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer and Jason Bloomberg look like prophets for having penned “Service Orient or Be Doomed” back in 2006 — a potential recession representing the “be doomed” part of the title for those who haven’t become satisfactorally service-oriented.

Later in 2006 the authors of “Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies” echoed the same sentiment, calling SOA crucial for “the very survival of a business.” Co-author Judith Hurwitz emphasized that very point in a podcast with us last year.

In 2008 we might get to see that play out a bit. In any economic downturn there are winners, companies who thrive while everyone else is struggling. If we hear that SOA is a behind-the-scenes force for a lot of those winners, then it could move from the realm of fond desire to corporate necessity. A recession could be the ultimate good news for people who love bad news scenario when it comes to SOA.

We’ll lead off our news coverage this week with a story on how analysts think SOA will fare if the economy chills. Expect this to be a major topic as the year progresses, as 2008 may turn out to be the year that SOA proves its business value or the year where it fails to match the hype.

Over the past few weeks the media has been full of 2007 recaps and 2008 predictions. It’s not just the tech media or the service-oriented architecture space. The national and international media does it too, in every arena: politics, entertaiment, business, etc.

All in all, it probably counts as a good thing that we take the time to look back and then project forward. It gets our heads out of the routine of paying attention to nothing but what’s most immediately in front of our faces. Perspective never hurts.

At SearchSOA.com, we’ve listed our top SOA stories of 2007 - stories 1-4 and stories 5-8. We’ve spoken with two exceptionally smart people in the SOA space about what 2008 might hold in store for SOA. IBM WebSphere CTO Jerry Cuomo discussed SOA maturation and event-driven SOA. Layer 7 CTO Toufic Boubez targeted operational governance and virtualization. That’s certainly plenty to digest for anyone looking to fulfill his/her U.S.D.A. recommended yearly dose of SOA perspective. Yet there is someone important we haven’t brought into the discussion … you.

Often missing in this particular dialog is the end user. The analysts, pundits and vendors make their thoughts known in the media echo chamber, but it’s high time some users sounded off. What was big for you in 2007? More importantly, what do you see as the big things looming for you in 2008? We want to know. Feel free to e-mail me at mmeehan@techtarget.com with your comments or post them in this blog (which, for those of you reading this in our newsletter, can be found through the hyperlink on the headline). If you want to write a full column, we’ll run it. If you just have a few quick points to make, we’ll collect those and get them up in the blog.

Users drive this bus. Ultimately, that’s how IT works. So where are you taking SOA in 2008? Is it along the same superhighways we all know about or have you found some shortcuts and interesting sideroads you plan to explore?

A wise person once said that when you set out to do something, a good place to start is at the beginning.

Service-oriented architecture is no different. Often would be practitioners of SOA start in the middle, trying to integrate two different applications. In many cases that serves a tactical purpose, but that doesn’t address how to build a truly loosely coupled service. When you attempt to tackle that higher degree of difficulty, it all starts with modeling. You’d be looking at a haphazard design process and slew of problems in its wake if you failed to do a proper job of modeling your intended service.

With that in mind, we’ve added a modeling lesson to our Service Orientation for Architects School. It offers a Webcast with noted SOA guru Thomas Erl, covering SOA design considerations and best practices. Erl ties design principles to the core principles of service orientation and delves into the relationships between various design elements.

Victor Harrison of Computer Sciences Corp. sat down for a podcast, giving five insider tips for SOA modeling. The final leg of the lesson is a report detailing what constitutes the SOA lifecycle and what architectural challenges arise as a result of this new development lifecycle. Do NOT miss this report. It features advice from numerous leading analysts in the SOA space and lays out the lifecycle considerations that need to be understood at the start of any SOA project. It qualifies as an essential resource.