SOA is an approach to application development that breaks down business applications into "services" - specific pieces of functionality - which can be combined and reused. This modular approach allows businesses to build applications that can provide more flexibility, and that can be efficiently built, combined and reused.

As part of this announcement, BEA is making available a Web-based tool that is designed to quantitatively measure and benchmark a company's baseline for pursuing SOA as its IT strategy. Called the "The BEA Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Readiness Self-Assessment," the instrument reflects the BEA SOA practice methodology and is designed to provide IT maturity comparisons against similar companies within key domains. Further, the company announced that it has expanded its SOA practice to include new consulting and educational service offerings, and appointed Bruce Graham to head the practice as vice president of worldwide professional services. The expanded service offerings are designed to provide customers with a practical roadmap, architecture design, and project-by-project implementations.

"Ninety percent of IT managers who have taken the BEA SOA Readiness Self-Assessment state SOA is of high business value, but less than half rate their organisation's proficiency in SOA as high," said Bruce Graham, vice president worldwide professional services, BEA Systems. "The benefits of SOA can be realised by IT organisations today - reusability, adaptability, and faster execution. Through use of its practical methodology focused on empowering customers, BEA's SOA practice has a proven track record of helping customers to realize these benefits."