SOA & WOA Magazine on Ulitzer

SOA Software, a SOA and Cloud Services Governance provider, on Tuesday announced that it is expanding European operations with the appointment of Steve Pope as Vice President of Europe, and Simon Parker as Director Technology Europe, to support and drive the company's rapid growth in the European markets. SOA Software is expanding its European support, sales team and channel partners to meet the growing demand for SOA products. Current global alliances include IBM, Microsoft, JBoss (RedHat), and SAP.

Steve Pope brings strong technology and business backgrounds with a proven track record of building successful customer relationships in the SOA Governance marketplace. Mr. Pope spent the last 12 years in business management roles with webMethods (acquired by Software AG) and most recently AmberPoint, where he spent 5 years developing customer governance solutions to the Northern European marketplace. Previously, Mr. Pope spent 10 years in management roles with Informix and Forte Software, leading the growth of both companies in the UK marketplace through the 1990s. He started his career pioneering the early deployment of UNIX/RDBMS technologies for the UK Ministry of Defence.

Simon Parker joins as SOA Software as Director Technology, Europe and brings considerable technical expertise to the company, with over 20 years consulting and technical services management experience working in the distributed systems, integration and application development markets. For the last 5 years Parker has specialized in SOA, web services security and XML networking. Prior to SOA Software, Mr. Parker worked for Cisco Systems, Reactivity, Wily Technology, Active Software, Forte Software and Informix.

SOA Software has continued to show remarkable results despite the challenging global economy. Through 2009, the company grew revenue 55% and delivered an operating profit as a result of new customers deploying unified SOA governance automation solutions, and existing customers scaling up their SOA programs. Large enterprise SOA programs are a reality today, with customers taking advantage of SOA to drive agility and redirect expenses from tactical to strategic initiatives.

"Our business has continued to grow through our strong execution in the US marketplace and some flagship wins in Europe," said Paul Gigg, president and CEO of SOA Software. "We are excited to be able to continue our European expansion and accelerate our business with the addition of executives of Steve and Simon's caliber and background."

Service-oriented architecture allows IT organizations to rapidly respond to the needs of a dynamic business environment, while improving efficiency and redirecting spend away from tactical infrastructure concerns to strategic initiatives. To deliver on this promise, the IT organization has to understand and control the services it has in production, determine how new services are to be built, and how new services should behave in production. The IT organization also has to understand which applications are being consumed and whether the services and their consumers are meeting contractual commitments for service-levels and other policy concerns. SOA Software's SOA Governance solutions deliver this understanding and provide these controls. Enterprise IT organizations are now realizing that without SOA Governance, their SOA programs are unlikely to succeed.