The benchmark group is interested in hearing from enterprise architects and other users of SOA techniques to ensure that the working group understands customer needs and “can develop the best possible benchmarking solutions.” The group plans an initial benchmark designed to cover Web services running on top of application servers, Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) technologies that connect and mediate services, and composite applications choreographed through BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) technologies. SPEC is a non-profit organization formed in 1988 to measure engineering workstation performance. The effort to achieve objective performance standards branched out in recent years to include benchmarks that cover Java (JVM and J2EE) systems. With its SOA effort, SPEC hopes to build on that earlier J2EE benchmark work. Read more about SPEC.

Speaking as a person who works for IBM, my personal thoughts on this benchmark are here: http://webspherecommunity.blogspot.com/2009/09/spec-working-on-standard-soa-benchmark.html As an IBM'er and as the working group chair, please post your comments and indicate your interest as noted in the press release. We truly want to have the best SOA application benchmark possible.