http://www.soamag.com The SOA Magazine is a monthly online publication provided by SOA Systems Inc. and Prentice Hall/PearsonPTR and is officially associated with the "Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl." SOA en-us Copyright 2006-2007, SOA Systems Inc. http://www.soamag.com/I1/0906-2.asp Services are the foundational layer of a service-oriented architecture but building service interfaces and exposing them to service consumers without a supporting infrastructure can result in a brittle, hard-to-sustain technical environment that leads us back to the problems service-orientation was supposed to fix. A services development platform such as a Web services runtime stack or an application server may no longer be enough to support the complex infrastructure requirements of a contemporary services ecosystem, such as mediation, orchestration, policy-based security enforcement, and services management. However, not all IT organizations have the need to meet all of these requirements. Careful analysis is necessary before decisions are made to invest in expensive infrastructure upgrades, especially as vendors continue to release a wide array of products often with confusing overlap in functionality and features, each claiming to act as an 'SOA-enabler'. In a four-part series we will examine the most common SOA infrastructure requirements, their various degrees of complexity and how organizations can take an incremental approach towards SOA infrastructure software adoption. In the first article, we tackle two categories of SOA infrastructure requirements: mediation and orchestration. We'll look at a number of solutions that can help address these requirements and conclude by analyzing industry trends that IT decision makers should be aware of as they prepare a long-term SOA strategy. (First published in The SOA Magazine Issue III, January 2006.) SOA http://www.soamag.com/contributors/bio-sroy.asp#When:03.01.07