OpenSpan announced the OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition, a new version of its flagship product that accelerates the realization of SOA strategies by enabling the rapid integration of desktop, legacy, virtualized and rich Internet applications and the expression of those integrations as Web services. As a result, enterprises can SOA-enable more of the enterprise infrastructure so that they achieve the intended business benefits of SOA.

The OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition allows enterprises to consume Web services within legacy applications or business process automations and to service-enable desktop and other legacy applications as well as the business process automations that span these applications. Effectively, the OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition enables enterprises to roll out Web services to business users as well as to expose application functionality and business process automations as Web services for consumption within SOA environments.

“As a leading property appraisal firm, we have used the OpenSpan Platform to integrate a number of closed legacy applications and to automate processes to drive efficiencies in our contact center organization,” said Martyn Wells, group IT director, Shepherd Chartered Surveyors LTD. “We are excited about the SOA Desktop Edition because it will allow us to service-enable our automations for easy consumption by our clients. With OpenSpan, we were able to more quickly reach our goal of a true service-oriented architecture that is expected to save us upwards of 20 percent on operating costs in less than 12 months.”

Accelerating consumption of Web services
The OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition allows enterprises to integrate disparate applications and Web services, automate processes across applications, extend legacy applications by adding Web services functionality, and expose automations as Web services on the desktop. Common uses of the OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition include:

• Integrate a new Web service with an existing application
• Expose legacy application functionality as Web services
• Expose business process automations as Web services
• Extend Enterprise BPM to the desktop
• Support virtual environments
• Sanction peer-to-peer communications

“OpenSpan can be best described as a SOA-ready development environment that can integrate all the desktop and browser components with Web services and server based applications to extend the capabilities of SOA directly to the users’ working environment,” writes Robin Bloor, analyst for Hurwitz and Associates, in the white paper “SOA and the Last Mile.” “It extends SOA to the place where a business process is actually implemented and executed. You can think of the OpenSpan Platform as delivering ‘the last mile’ of SOA.”