What is Service Oriented Architecture or SOA? Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive for IBM Software Group, starts the discussion with his challenge to the group in front of him to identify any organization that is not intent on finding a way to be more efficient (effective) in how they run their business. He proceeds to discuss business process optimization trends and the value SOA brings to any process optimization strategy.

Paul Henaghan, Senior Vice President, Asia for Software AG, discusses how companies in Asia are adopting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), including observations about which types of organizations are taking on SOA and the countries that harbor these mavericks.

Bossini has become a leading fashion retailer in Asia-Pacific with over 1,000 stores in 30 countries. A key metric for its success is complete visibility of its business and operational processes. The company has chosen to adopt Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as the platform from which to develop new applications that power its business processes.

Service-oriented architecture and business process management have to go hand in hand to truly enable and optimize business process improvement.

The Hong Kong government is now inviting tenders for IT services under the Standing Offer Agreement for Quality Professional Services (SOA-QPS) scheme and procurement of about 2,500 PCs.

University Health Network (UHN), one of Canada's largest teaching hospitals, is rolling out Cognos' BI software to enable more timely performance reporting, measurement and analysis and help improve and measure the success of its health care delivery.

HP announces a software governance initiative to help companies address the legal, financial and security risks faced when adopting free and open source software (FOSS).

Organizations that under-invest in the software oriented architecture (SOA) governance initiative will fail to reap the long-term benefits SOA offers.