Adopting a Data Services Layer as Part of Your SOA Strategy

As part of their SOA strategy, companies are adopting a data services layer that provides the technology and code for the most optimized data access and integration.

This will greatly simplify development and maintenance, enforce compliant use of data, promote greater levels of
reuse, and introduce easy-to-use capabilities for using information in dynamic and real-time processes.

The demand for a data services layer came about because of some common problems companies are facing with their SOA initiatives:

• Data volume and complexity
• Issues with data access
• Tightly coupled architecture design
• Data management issues regarding security, performance, quality, availability and manageability

Tightly coupled connections and information locked away in monolithic application silos has proven to be a difficult obstacle to building flexible services. The value of SOA is reuse and agility, but without flexibility at the data tier, that value quickly erodes.

Implementing a data tier assures ready access to enterprise data scattered across redundant databases and confined within proprietary applications, helping companies to more fully realize the value of their SOA implementations.

New Data Service Standards: SDO and DAS

DataDirect’s Data Services Vision

Click graphic for a full-sized image.

SDO (Service Data Objects) and DAS (Data Access Services)
are the key standards for implementing data services. SDO is a new data access standard that offers applications and services participating in a SOA to access any kind of data, including relational, XML, or application-specific data objects, from various kinds of data sources in a consistent, standards-based way. And the task of actually connecting applications to data sources is performed by DAS.

With more than 20 years in the standards-based data access middleware business, DataDirect Technologies is uniquely positioned to support the rapidly emerging SDO and DAS specifications within its family of data connectivity and
mainframe integration products.

DataDirect's parent company, Progress Software, announced its acquisition of Xcalia, a leader in the development and adoption
of the SDO standard and data integration technologies. Xcalia is
now part of DataDirect Technologies. DataDirect plans to announce
new products later in the year that combine Xcalia technologies with
DataDirect industry leading products.

If you would like to speak to an expert about how DataDirect can meet your SOA needs, please call 1-800-876-3101 or submit a Request for Information form and an account executive will contact you.