Locus has been selected by the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners to perform environmental site assessment, soil and groundwater investigation and cleanup, environmental compliance assessment and environmental information management services for The Port of Los Angeles. The agreement with Locus is valued at $1,890,000 for a 3-year period.

Trubiquity (formerly Autoweb) has launched its new software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture. Trubiquity's new software architecture, named TRUcore, improves communications among global business teams, from an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) level down through a company's global supply chain. The new architecture also streamlines customers' internal business processes and offers better coordination, data management and process execution between a company's business units and its global supply chain partners.

EquaTerra announced that its Governance WorkPlace tool, which automates the management of multiple service providers and enables informed decision-making in support of back-office processes in both shared services and outsourced environments, is now available as a hosted, Software as a Service (SaaS) solution.

HCL Technologies announced the launch of its new SaaS Service Delivery Platform (SDP) AGORA. Service disruption and Web 2.0 have resulted in a sudden outburst of participation by the user and developer communities. This, along with increasing collaboration between independent service providers, communications service providers, application service providers and content service providers have resulted in the service value chain becoming larger.

After a $1.5 million angel round, Desktone, which was started in 2006 by Eric Pulier, who also started SOA Software, US Interactive and IVT, picked up $17 million in first-round funding about a year ago from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Citrix Systems and the China-based Tangee International. SoftBank as well as Deutsche Telekom could become service providers. Ruda says the brains behind the technology is Paul Gaffney, the former CIO of Staples. The company has maybe 40 people, more than half of them in Shanghai doing development, which explains Tangee's involvement.

The way business applications are evolving, enterprises are learning to accept and embrace the notion of applications that they neither control nor host. Now enterprises are leveraging applications that run a business through the Internet platform. As these applications become core to many businesses, so does the need to incorporate these applications into the enterprise's existing infrastructure and make them work together.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.