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.

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.

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.

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