For the last week, the rumor of Zune, reportedly some kind of Microsoft-branded iPod, dominated tech news, community, and blog sites. The general media was obsessed, too, as the Zune story offered so many enticing angles, such as Microsoft battling its arch-rival Apple, the company now defining the digital music experience; Microsoft back-stabbing its digital music partners by embracing a vertical digital music strategy; and Microsoft jumping deeper into the consumer electronics space despite huge...

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Posted by TomR at 01:36 PM | Permalink

This week Accenture, the $15 billion global consulting, technology services, and outsourcing firm announced it would be investing $450 million in service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives and activities over the next three years. The fact that Accenture was betting big on SOA was not news, but by attaching a nearly half a billion dollar figure to its bet, the company made the strength of its commitment obvious to the industry, the media, clients, and prospects. Beyond...

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Posted by TomR at 02:34 PM | Permalink

Organizations, vendors, and the trade media have embraced the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA). In an SOA environment industry standards like the XML markup language and various Web service technologies are used to expose software as "services." By exposing software as services, organizations can more easily access these systems, as well as tie multiple services together with their own business logic to create "composite applications." SOA investment is compelling for so many IT departments because...

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Posted by TomR at 01:46 AM | Permalink