S4i Systems unveiled a new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) capability in S4i Express—its electronic document management system for IBM System i computers.

With this new feature, S4i has satisfied IBM’s business and technical requirements for acceptance into the IBM SOA Specialty Business Partner initiative. The IBM Business Partner SOA Specialty program is for Business Partners who make a very significant investment in IBM SOA products and technologies through the SOA industry framework.

The S4i Express SOA feature provides an industry standard way to retrieve and store business critical documents under S4i Express control. The S4i Express SOA services are available for most operating systems and platforms and may be integrated into both web based and operating system dependent applications.

SOA provides a set of standards that result in developers being able to create and deploy applications much more quickly and at a lower cost. In this case, a document management application no longer requires custom development for a close integration into an organization’s business application. Therefore, requisite components in S4i Express can be integrated into one or many applications.

According to S4i’s CEO, Spencer Elliott, “S4i Express is now not only an application that can be used as a stand alone tool to store and retrieve documents, but it also integrates into client applications and services to add functionality and richness. This represents a big opportunity for developers on any platform to take advantage of the industrial quality of the System i and S4i Express without having specific System i knowledge.”

One mainstream System i ERP software vendor has already licensed S4i’s SOA feature along with S4i Express and will soon offer an integrated document management solution to their customers.