SOA Innovation Lab and SOPERA - Open Innovation for a Joint Agenda of Users and Vendors

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) strengthen the vendor independence of companies, freeing them from the lock-in monolithic architectures tend to incur. Deutsche Post has externalized their SOA knowledge, skills, and infrastructure to the community, engaging in open innovation to respond to new challenges in the logistics industries. One example is SOPERA, an enterprise service bus that was open-sourced to the Eclipse foundation in order to lower the investment threshold for companies engaging in a SOA approach. A second example is the SOA Innovation Lab, Germany’s first business driven EAM initiative. Here one of the current workstreams, led by Daimler as one of the currently sixteen prominent member companies, investigates into the implications of standard software packages on enterprise architecture, soliciting highly positive response from ISVs towards a joint strategic agenda between users and providers. 1 Business imperatives for innovation The logistic industry is experiencing new challenges and chances. On the one side there is increasing pressure through deregulation, European and global competition and substitution (e.g. industry discontinuity for letter business). On the other side there is Growth potential through globalization, E-business growth and the unbundling of value chains due to specialization and industrialization. For Deutsche Post this has led to three strategic IT-imperatives and chances: $ Flexibilization under uncertainty: the application landscape needs to be transformed into a robust basis that is adaptive to strategic business change