SOA Consortium Holds Successful Inaugural Meeting, Executive Summit “Top 5 Lessons Learned” Report Webcast and Announces Nine New Members

Planning Underway for First European Meeting June 27-28 in Brussels, Belgium

NEEDHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The SOA Consortium™ today announced that Aberdeen Group, CSC, General Services Administration, Hurwitz & Associates, Integration Clearinghouse, Kohl’s Department Stores, Maryfran Johnson & Associates, TethersEnd Consulting, and Wells Fargo Bank have joined.

“It helps confirm our belief that SOA is a powerful business agility story that resonates across the industry and can be a benefit to organizations of any size.”

"Although the SOA Consortium is less than two months old, we are already seeing a tremendous response from end-users and vendors both large and small as well as from industry analyst firms such as Aberdeen, Hurwitz & Associates and Maryfran Johnson & Associates," said Dr. Richard Soley, Executive Director, SOA Consortium. "It helps confirm our belief that SOA is a powerful business agility story that resonates across the industry and can be a benefit to organizations of any size."

March was a busy month for the newly formed SOA Consortium. On March 20, Richard Soley and Brenda Michelson presented the “Top 5 Insights” from the recently held SOA Executives Summits via a webinar. Press and blogger coverage indicates particularly strong interest in the Executive insights regarding the complementary relationship of SOA and BPM, and the ‘game changing’ nature of SOA for application providers. The webcast version of that report is available on-demand on the SOA Consortium website, http://www.soa-consortium.org/info-pr.

The SOA Consortium held its first, well-attended general member meeting in San Diego, California on March 28-29. During the inaugural meeting in San Diego, the complete findings of the SOA Executive Summits were discussed by the membership, the Promoting Business-Driven SOA and Executing Business-Driven SOA working groups shared work-in-progress, and plans were made for the Steering Committee elections to be held at the next quarterly meeting.

The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market businesses successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. Founding sponsors are BEA Systems, Inc., Cisco, IBM Corporation, and SAP AG.

The SOA Consortium is holding its inaugural European meeting June 27-28 at the Crowne Plaza Brussels City Centre in Brussels, Belgium. Organizations interested in joining the SOA Consortium and attending the European meeting should visit the website, http://www.soa-consortium.org/info-pr or email [e-mail] for more information.

About The SOA Consortium

SOA Consortium founding enterprise members include Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Founding sponsors are BEA Systems, Inc., Cisco, IBM Corporation, and SAP AG. Participants in the consortium to date include: Aberdeen Group, Avis Budget Car Rental, Bank of America, CellExchange, Inc., CSC, General Services Administration, HP, Hurwitz & Associates, Integration Clearinghouse, Integration Consortium, Kohl’s Department Stores, Maryfran Johnson & Associates, Object Management Group, TethersEnd Consulting, WebEx Communications, and Wells Fargo Bank. Any organization may join the SOA Consortium. The SOA Consortium is managed by the Object Management Group.

For more information, please visit http://www.soa-consortium.org or email [e-mail].

Note to editors: SOA Consortium, OMG and Object Management Group are trademarks of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.