BEA Systems has some innovative technology and it's an important competitor in the SOA and application server markets. Customers are much better off if it stays independent, but that doesn't look likely.

Charter Communication’s wildcard DNS resolution maybe useful to users surfing the web through a browser, but will break all other IP applications. Error handling needs to be performed locally by the application receiving the error. Handling errors in the network for application traffic causes more problems that they solve. Using wildcard domain names to handle unresolved hosts is bad engineering. Period.

Contributor Robert Hertzberg talks with Ted Farrell, chief architect for tools and middleware at Oracle, about the business value of implementing a service-oriented architecture.

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webMethods, Inc. (Nasdaq: WEBM) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Infravio, Inc. for approximately $38 million in cash. The deal is expected to close during the month of September 2006 and it is anticipated to be accretive to webMethods' earnings per share (EPS) beginning with the quarter ending March 31, 2007.

Yesterday BEA announced it would acquire SOA Governance vendor Flashline for an undisclosed sum.

Rumors were flying last week about the possibility of HP acquiring Mercury Interactive and yesterday those rumors proved to be true when HP laid out $4.5b in cash for the troubled company.

Reactivity has announced availability of its newest family of XML-SOA products and they're not only looking sexy, but have some great new features designed to assist in speeding up your SOA initiative.

Earlier this week F5 Networks and Reactivity announced a partnership that on the outside appears to be an innocent go-to-market strategy, but a deeper look shows the two are doing more than just holding hands...

It's the battle of the "E"s in the technology ring as Enterprise Mashup Services (EMS) start intruding on the Enterprise Information Integration (EII) space.

Competitors of DataPower in the SOA management, security, and integration spaces have been wondering what became of the hardware SOA company snatched up by the WebSphere division of software-powerhouse IBM.

Six months after the acquisition, IBM announced the new IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA appliances and SOA security consulting services.

That's right, after months of buzz surrounding Oracle and JBoss, Red Hat tips its hat, filled with $350M, to the OSS enterprise service platform vendor...

During our recent review of ESB products, we picked on Sonic Software quite a bit for its design-time environment.

Yesterday, Sonic announced version 7.0 of its ESB offering (with availability May 1) and it appears that it's moving in the right direction.

OASIS today announced that the WS-Security (WSS) v1.1 specification has been ratified as a standard.