The service oriented approach provides an unprecedented flexibility, more efficient business processes and significant cost savings for enterprises. However, it is important to realize that the specific goals differ from organization to organization and these require different types of SOA solutions.

The developers of enterprise Intranet portals have long set the priority goal of creating a user environment, which promotes the building and availability of internal knowledge by deploying information-sharing and collaboration techniques. We are aware that each enterprise has a lot of data lurking in locations that are completely hidden or they are available to only a few users, whereas these could be useful to many.

In large enterprise informatics the emphasis is put on fulfilling business needs to the greatest possible extent and in addition to this - due to the development in technologies and tools - customized support is provided to users.

BEA AquaLogic BPM Suite efficiently bridges the human and the system side of processes together, thus providing the ability to develop and install BPM during a 60-day or even a shorter period. Its additional distinctive feature is that it helps establish a close, efficient collaboration between the IT area and the business area.

One of the major problems of service oriented (SOA) strategy-based enterprise IT infrastructures and operation models is creating and managing services property. Service registries provisioned with credentials can be well utilized in development times and for designing development projects as well as for defining dynamic services at runtime. By deploying it, information about what services we have available, what characteristics they have and where they are available can be obtained on a standard platform.

The Service Repository applications described in the first article of our series of articles facilitate the recording and enquiry of information on services property assets on a well-browsable standard platform (UDDI) even at runtime. However, UDDI repositories do not provide a natural medium for describing other service-related assets. In real life and in development time other values regarding the services may be also very important, such as different services, framework systems, good patterns, available training courses, documentation, etc., namely any information that may help the developers. Without these necessary accessories the description and irretrievability of services can provide only a minor part of support and regulation of the projects in development time.

Regardless of the size of an enterprise, the cutover to service oriented operation is beneficial to all enterprises that would like to make their IT processes more transparent and manageable. Alerant, the distributor of BEA Systems in Hungary believes that in smaller enterprises this involves the adoption of SOA approach and the creation of the respective SOA architecture. In case of large, complex infrastructures the deployment of the appropriate tool kit is also indispensable.

A few years ago Java language was thought - due to its slow nature - to be unsuitable for implementing systems - such as telecommunication services or switching logics - that require fast response times and large volume of transaction processing.

In conjunction with SOA solutions gaining ground, a very dynamic growth of the business process management market is forecasted for the coming years, a growth of USD 1 billion is anticipated by 2008. With the help of Gábor Darmai, Director of Alerant Inc., we can learn in our article about what plans BEA Systems, one of the defining enterprises of the infrastructure market has in this area.

The service-oriented architecture handles business processes as elements built on one another, and establishes communication between software items and systems supporting the different activities of an enterprise.

BEA WebLogic Mobility Server simplifies mobile development and management enabling the delivery of portals and applications to mobile devices faster and more cost effective.

New business processes had to be implemented within the points collection system that is essential for the promotion program: from the registration to the more complex point campaigns.

BEA application server enables enterprises to create service-oriented architecture or to further develop their legacy systems into this direction.

It is no longer enough that up-to-date application servers provide a reliable, self-supervised and self-fine-tuned basis.

The purpose of a support service package may be to ensure high availability and adequate performance of applications and IT infrastructures running them.

There has been a general tendency by international companies towards transforming their local service provision into a regional support centre. The extension of local standby can be justified in case the given product is widely used, however, if a product is being penetrated on the market, the existence of a local support is crucial.

With its revenue expected to reach 500 to 600 million Hungarian Forints, the first full year in business has been profitable for Alerant Inc., established in the fall of 2003. "Our expectations and calculations concerning the company have proved correct, and the past experiences of the founders were a great help in getting the company off to a quick start," said Managing Director Mr. Tamás Szabó, who had worked for five years as the CEO of IQSOFT and acted as the manager of the U.S.-based subsidiary of KFKI for two years.