BEA is making an effort to extend its SOA service offerings, by allowing companies to quantitatively measure and benchmark their baseline for pursuing SOA as its IT strategy. A new Web-based tool, The BEA Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Readiness Self-Assessment, will allow companies to assess what SOA implementation will offer, and how far it can be extended in existing IT environments.

BEA is expanding its SOA Practice to include new consulting and educational service offerings. The new services will provide companies with a practical road map, architecture design, and project-by-project implementations of SOA.

Its new tool is based on the company's SOA Domain Methodology, in which six key areas of SOA are highlighted to help carry out and plan an SOA strategy. BEA will offer results in a customized report which offers practical suggestions on improving SOA maturity for each of BEA's six SOA domain areas.

BEA looks at business process and strategy; architecture, designed to assess a company's service layers; building blocks examining shared applications as a company's overall relationship diagram of services; projects and developments to identify opportunities for service-enabling legacy applications; the cost companies face when projecting estimated capital and expenses necessary to meet SOA requirements; and organization and governance that reviews IT's roles and responsibilities within a company.

Once this information has been analyzed, BEA helps customers understand the process of SOA integration. Both educational workshops and training courses,  dealing with overall technical aspects of SOA, are offered. Customers are schooled in technical issues so skills may be developed that will make introducing SOA into IT as smooth as possible.

Once this has been completed, customers will start planning for SOA using a road map of priorities to develop individual integration strategies. A detailed enterprise SOA transformation plan including the phases of evolution, organization and governance which may be needed, and a cost-benefit analysis, will be presented.

Lastly, an SOA Foundation Service is offered to guide customers through a mock SOA implementation project. Mentorship on best practices for architecture, service definition, implementation guidelines and reuse, will also be available; with support to ensure the successful migration of SOA into a full enterprise.