NEW YORK — The Association for Retail Technology Standards, the standards division of the National Retail Federation, announced the release of the SOA Blueprint for Retail and associated SOA Best Practices technical reports. Developed by 26 of the world's leading retailers and software providers, the SOA Blueprint is designed to help retailers understand and implement service oriented architecture (SOA), an effective and cost efficient strategy for enabling IT to support internal business practices and collaboration with external partners.

The Blueprint describes the infrastructure components, tools, models for business services and how ARTS standards can ensure success in companies' SOA implementation. While SOA is a generic infrastructure strategy that can be implemented by any industry, the differentiator is in the business services (functions). The ARTS Blueprint is specific to retail, defining many SOA services by the retail functions Buy, Sell, Logistics and Administer.

"The purpose of these technical reports is to demystify SOA and give the retail industry a technology- and vendor-neutral depiction of the best practices for SOA for retail," said Greg Wilmer, vice president of information technology at Big Lots and co-chair of the SOA Blueprint committee. "I look forward to working with ARTS on future projects to help vendors and retail companies alike get the most of this architectural shift."

The SOA Best Practices technical report outlines technical rules for ensuring application interoperability. As usual, the devil is in the details and it will be difficult to realize the full benefits of SOA without expert technical guidance for interface considerations, versioning, extensions and naming conventions. By adding Best Practices as a reference guide with the Blueprint, ARTS supplies retailers with both the business functionality and technical guidance for implementing SOA.

"Our goal is to promote and enable the adoption of SOA in retail and the utilization of ARTS standards and schemas to support solving retail business challenges," said David Dorf, Director, Technology Strategy, Oracle Retail and co-chair of the SOA Blueprint committee. "The Blueprint will help reduce the costs of implementation by helping retailers make the right choices for their situation."

"ARTS has worked diligently to help retailers take advantage of SOA benefits with a focus on reusing business services," said Richard Mader, ARTS Executive Director. "These technical documents, thanks to the volunteer experts that created them, make ARTS a must-contact if you are considering implementing SOA."

"The value of Service Oriented Architecture is particularly compelling for retailers who face the twin challenges of providing consistent multi-channel experiences to their customers while minimizing conflicting business logic in the enterprise," said Michael Julson, chief technology officer, Escalate Retail. "These documents establish a foundation for retailers to work from to simplify the task of getting started on their own SOA path. Escalate Retail is excited to be a part of the NRF ARTS effort."

ARTS will release its first standard built on the Blueprint and Best Practices in March. Retail Transaction Interface is an XML interface definition which allows existing POS sales functions to be used by other customer service solutions such as self checkout, fueling points, kiosks, shop-on-the-Web, store-within-a-store, line buster and other complementary customer interfaces, ensuring accuracy and consistent policy application. The implementation of RTI will ease and speed the integration of store solutions, helping retailers offer additional customer services in their stores while maintaining a consistent look and feel.