Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation

New SPEC group developing SOA-based application benchmark

WARRENTON, Va., September 9, 2009 — The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has formed a new working group to develop standard methods of measuring performance for typical middleware, database and hardware deployments of applications based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Current SPEC member companies committed to developing a new SOA application measurement standard include IBM, Oracle and VMware.

Seeking industry input

SPEC is interested in hearing from enterprise architects, IT managers and other potential users of SOA techniques to ensure that the working group understands customer needs and can develop the best possible benchmarking solutions.

Organizations that are not currently SPEC members are invited to join the new working group. Membership is open to vendors, universities, R&D organizations, and users of SOA technologies.

"Service Oriented Architectures are being deployed within enterprises of many sectors, including government, banking, retail and manufacturing," says Andrew Spyker, an SOA runtime architect and chair of the new group. "The benefits for companies deploying SOA include business flexibility and cost optimization. An industry-standard benchmark will help SOA users understand best practices for improving performance and help vendors deliver performance optimizations based on typical customer scenarios."

Defining the methodology

In developing a new SOA benchmark, SPEC will draw on its expertise in creating widely used system-level benchmark suites.

The group plans an initial benchmark designed around three parts of a typical SOA deployment infrastructure:

• services on top of application servers using web services;
• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technologies that connect and mediate the services; and
• choreographing services into larger composite applications through BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) technologies.

The SOA Performance working group realizes that the technologies around which the initial benchmark is being built aren't the only important ones; different aspects of SOA that would introduce additional technologies are likely to be explored in the future.

A key aspect of the benchmark will be measuring SOA technology use in ways that are typical in customer deployments while being flexible enough to cover current vendor implementations.

SPEC expects that a wide range of computer server manufacturers, systems integrators, and SOA technology software vendors will run the benchmark and report results. IT professionals and decision makers will use data from running the benchmark tests to reduce costs and adapt their IT infrastructures to changing business needs.

For more information

For more information on the SOA Performance working group, e-mail info@spec.org.

About SPEC

SPEC is a non-profit organization that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks to evaluate performance for the newest generation of computing systems. Its membership comprises more than 80 leading computer hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, research organizations, and government agencies worldwide. For more information, visit www.spec.org or contact the SPEC office by phone: 540-349-7878, fax: 540-349-5992, or email: info@spec.org.

Media contact:                         Bob Cramblitt
                                                  Cramblitt & Company
                                                  919-481-4599; info@cramco.com

Product and service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.