New York, January 12, 2009 - The Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), the standards division of the National Retail Federation (NRF), is pleased to announce version 1.2 of the ARTS SOA Blueprint and SOA Best Practices for Retail documents. These technical documents are the result of two years’ worth of effort by experts representing more than 26 retail and vendor companies. The Blueprint presents approaches and alternatives for adopting SOA while the Best Practices Report details rules, methods and guidelines consistent with established standards.
Version 1.2 is the second update since the initial release in January 2008. ARTS SOA Blueprint updates include: adding Plan to the domain model; supplying more detail in the other domains; a SOA Maturity Model describing the growth path for SOA from Pilot to Full Implementation; and a description of Web services expanded for alternative methods. Updates to the SOA Best Practices Report include: expanded Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) section; an updated description and useage gudelines section for UDDI and WSDL, principal components of webservices; and enhanced descriptions of the SOA Tenets, the basic rules for SOA.
“The combined expertise contributed by the participating companies should be a significant accelerator for retailers adopting SOA in their enterprise,” said David Dorf, co-chair of the Blueprint committee and Director of Technology for Oracle Retail.
Previous releases have been downloaded nearly 500 times and received much praise for the guidance they offer retailers to: improve business processes; realize a single view of data through Master Data Management; leverage existing investments by making information and capabilities from legacy applications available as a Service; and increase business agility while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO).
“We have seen a lot of interest in the marketplace for guidelines around SOA, and the information contained in these publications really hits the mark”, said Viswanath Srikanth, chair of the SOA Best Practices committee and Senior Software Engineer, IBM.
Each release has expanded the information to guide retailers in successfully implementing SOA that is so critical to IT business support in challenging times which require rapid response to requests for business changes to produce significant ROI.
“Version 1.2 completes our initial technical documentation effort to help members successfully implement SOA,” said Richard Mader, Executive Director of ARTS. “Our focus for 2009 will be to share SOA implementation guidelines with retailers though tailored educational sessions.” ARTS has developed a comprehensive SOA education program based on the Blueprint and Best Practices Report. The program offers detailed information on incorporating the ARTS Data Model and standard XML schemas in your SOA infrastructure to ensure success.
Release 1.2 is available free to ARTS members and at a cost of $249 to non-members. More information is available on www.nrf-arts.org or by visiting the ARTS Pavilion booth 1859 on the exhibit floor of the NRF Annual Convention January 11 – 14 at the Javits Center N.Y.
The Association for Retail Technology Standards is an international membership organization dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards. Since 1993, ARTS has been delivering application standards exclusively to the retail industry. ARTS has four standards: The Standard Relational Data Model, UnifiedPOS, ARTS XML and Standard Requests for Proposal. Membership is open to all members of the international technology community- retailers from all industry segments, application developers and hardware companies. www.nrf-arts.org.
For Immediate Release
Kathy Grannis (212) 624-8431
grannisk@nrf.com
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