Application bottlenecks in modern enterprises are not always caused by hardware limitations. The software providing the foundation for a service oriented architecture (SOA) can introduce its own set of limiting factors.

A company called Rogue Wave Software is looking to re-invent the wheel, so to speak, when it comes to application development and performance on SOA environments. The company’s new Rogue Wave Hydra platform leverages parallel processing and other techniques to establish “pipelines” that the company says improve throughput and overall performance by orders of magnitude.

The system can be used to execute and distribute either software components or services, mixing simultaneous processing with a point-to-point architecture to avoid the kinds of bottlenecks that arise in complex, high-performance architectures.

The need for improved application environments is increasing largely due to the success of SOA and enabling technologies like XML, which have greatly improved performance and flexibility but only to the extent that serial-based applications environments will allow. As data loads increase, the need for applications to more efficiently process transactions, messages and other exchanges becomes paramount.

Rogue Wave says its platform allows data centers to employ parallel processing while still using their legacy, serial-based software. But it would still seem that the best way to kick things up is to see more parallel applications. Intel and others are working with app developers to foster more parallel processing to meet the needs of multicore processors, but the change is happening slowly.