WebMethods was quick to announce Aug. 2 that the Internal Revenue Service had selected Fabric, the company's flagship business integration product suite, to anchor the agency's business systems modernization program.
But the IRS contract is one of only a few examples of the spread of service-oriented architecture (SOA) among federal agencies. Experts agree that SOA will play an increasingly important role in the development of agency information technology infrastructures, but it could be awhile before any substantial market for SOA solutions develops.
SOAs loosely link various software-based services using middleware technology to provide business applications. HTML, Extensible Markup Language and Web Services Description Language are common technologies that can be part of an SOA. No single SOA product exists, but offerings such as Fabric and IBM's WebSphere platform can become the basis of an architecture.
