For example, American Modern Insurance Group Inc. must bring together its developers and the team responsible for deploying applications as it continues an SOA project that will replace two Unisys ClearPath mainframes and two databases with a single IBM zSeries mainframe running the DB2 database.

The US$62 million project will also replace a core legacy Cobol application, said Patrick Law, vice president of infrastructure at the Amelia, Ohio-based insurer.

Law said the two groups must decide together how best to "package" the services to gain optimum performance and reliability. In addition, a cooperative effort is needed to determine which services will run on specific platforms, such as host servers, application servers and portals. "In the old days, there was no such concept as needing to worry about packaging, because everything [was] put on one machine and run," he said.

T-Mobile International AG is working to ensure cooperation between IT development and operations groups for an SOA project set to start in May. The effort is aimed at creating a common authentication and authorization services layer for a micropayments application.

Such cooperation between the groups would also ease the process of executing several similar SOA projects that are slated to begin over the next two years, said Alastair Wade, principal consultant at Buffalo, N.Y.-based Computer Task Group Inc., which is working with Bonn-based T-Mobile on the project.