SOA Software purchases Web services-based interface from Merrill Lynch Last month, SOA Software — formerly Digital Evolution — proudly announced that financial giant Merrill Lynch was a customer. Today, the tables were turned when SOA Software revealed that it is purchasing technology from Merrill Lynch — in the form of SOLA (Service-Oriented Legacy Architecture), an interface to CICS apps that runs on IBM mainframes and provides access to legacy data and business logic via standard Web services protocols.Why purchase mainframe service-enablement software from a customer? Mainly because SOA Software CEO Eric Pulier recognized that Merrill Lynch had a robust, battle-tested solution. “They came to the conclusion that such a solution did not exist on the market,” Pulier said. “They built something that is massively scalable. It’s currently running over 40 mission-critical applications, 1.5 million transactions per day, and over 600 Web services already.”Merrill Lynch Chief Technology Architect Andrew Brown oversaw the development of SOLA, which is known internally as X4ML. “We’re a very large company, and from time to time we find our scale is so great that we can’t buy what we need,” Brown said. “We’re extremely excited to get it into the market.” SOA Software says that SOLA will be available in January. Software Development