The SCA and SDO specifications can help organizations to more easily create new and transform existing IT assets, enabling reusable services that may be rapidly assembled to meet changing business requirements. These specifications greatly reduce complexity associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify services regardless of programming language and deployment platform. Both are technologies designed to simplify the representation of business logic and business data. Early customers are already implementing and gaining value.

"We applaud the Open SOA Collaboration for reaching this milestone and for choosing to take the next step and advance this important work through an open standards process," said Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "We look forward to furthering the evolution of SCA from specifications to standards and to promoting the broadest possible industry adoption through education and implementation efforts."

Since November 2005, 18 companies have joined the effort to work on new industry specifications aimed at simplifying SOA application development. Partner companies include BEA Systems, Cape Clear, IBM Corporation, Interface21, IONA, Oracle, Primeton Technologies, Progress Software, Red Hat, Rogue Wave Software, SAP AG, Siemens AG, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, TIBCO Software, and Xcalia. Together, these companies have achieved significant progress around SCA and SDO specifications.

The partners will continue to incubate and drive technology initiatives focused on simplifying SOA application development. Additionally, the group's vendor-neutral Web site (http://osoa.org). will continue to serve as an information resource for access to draft specifications and white papers, and provide a forum for industry input and feedback.

"As a founding partner in the SCA/SDO collaboration, Oracle is pleased at how quickly we have reached our goal of maturing these specifications and that OASIS has agreed to move them forward into industry standards," said Don Deutsch, vice president, Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle. "Oracle's commitment to driving industry standards, that are crucial to our customers' SOA environments, and to adopting these standards in Oracle products is demonstrated by our SCA/SDO collaboration and by the support of open standards throughout the OracleŽ Fusion Middleware product family."

About OASIS
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. The consortium produces more Web services standards than any other organization along with standards for security, e-business, and standardization efforts in the public sector and for application-specific markets. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. For more information, visit www.oasis-open.org.

About Open SOA
The Open SOA Collaboration represents an informal group of industry leaders that share a common interest: defining a language-neutral programming model that meets the needs of enterprise developers who are developing software that exploits Service Oriented Architecture characteristics and benefits. The Collaboration is not a Standards Body; it is a set of vendors who wish to innovate rapidly in the development of this programming model and to deliver Specifications to the community for implementation. These specifications are made available to the community on a Royalty Free basis for the creation of compatible implementations. When mature, the intent is to hand these specifications over to a suitable Standards Body for future shepherding. For more information, visit www.osoa.org.

Trademarks
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.