SOA Software Drives SOA, Business ROI with SOA Governance 
The revolution in SOA Governance’s ability to drive more business-savvy SOA projects with quicker ROI continues. This time, with a suite of offerings from SOA Software.
SOA Software is shipping improvements across its suite of SOA Governance lifecycle offerings, including Repository Manager 6.2, Portfolio Manager 6.2, and a special version of Portfolio Manager tuned for IBM’s marquis SOA Governance offering, WebSphere Registry and Repository. All are shipping now.
Repository Manager 6.2 is SOA Software’s latest update to its SOA lifecycle governance platform, with a host of enhancements to speed SOA projects and accelerate time to value. Repository Manager continues to make it easier than ever for developers, architects and business analysts to create and manage world-class business applications,” Brent Carlson, SOA Software’s senior vice president of technology told Integration Developer News.
“Today, we’re seeing a second-wave of SOA adoption, where business managers and IT are both finding out that SOA governance can make SOA projects go smoother, and better deliver real returns on SOA investments.” Carlson told IDN. “Many organizations that years ago called SOA governance ‘castor oil,’ today have a mess of spaghetti [SOA] services and telling us: Now we get it.”
Key features of Repository Manager 6.2 include:
- Analysis of Asset Relationship and SOA Impact: Repository Manager 6.2 can generate and show relationships between applications, services, schemas, components and other SOA development assets.
- Asset Search Improvements: Customers can add their own specialized searches to default searches in Repository Manager.
- Better Integration with Policy Manager: Support for acquiring virtual services generated via SOA Software’s Policy Manager and support for importing bundled WSDL/Schema packages, which means customers can rapidly deploy services and other software assets within the SOA enterprise lifecycle from one control point.
SOA Software’s Repository Manager software integrates with leading application development environments, works with all major run-time registries including IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, HP’s SOA Systinet and UDDI registries.
Portfolio Manager 6.2 which is designed as a planning governance product that will help IT and business manager better align their SOA investments with business objectives, automates this planning process and maintains these associations throughout the service lifecycle via its integration
The combination of Portfolio Manager, Repository Manager and two other SOA Software offerings (Service Manager and Policy Manager) enables enterprises to build the right services, build their services the right way, and operate their services correctly.
“Portfolio Manager brings unprecedented end to end service visibility and traceability from business strategy all the way down to runtime implementation,” Carlson added.
Key Portfolio Manager 6.2 features include:
- Browser based SOA Portfolio Management Impact Analysis To dynamically generate visual maps of relationships between business imperatives and candidate services. This visualization lets SOA planners better select candidate SOA services that best match business needs.
- Enhanced Search Capabilities Configurable XML-based search to allow IT and business users to use their own vocabularies, letting them avoid complex search rules.
- Fits into Standard EA Planning Reference Models< Provides in-built support for leading enterprise architecture (EA) reference models, including Zachman Framework, Federal Enterprise Architecture, ITL, APQC PCF among others.
“In Portfolio Manager we let organizations see all the options, by role, so they can build to their immediate needs and still align with a longer-term strategic planning [approach to SOA.” Carlson told IDN. “Giving IT and business these options to achieve that balance between today’s needs, today’s resources and longer-term goals is a way to empower them to make decisions and fund projects without facing a downside downstream.
Relatedly, SOA Software also brings these improvements to its integration with IBM’s marquis SOA governance offering, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
Portfolio Manager for IBM’s WebSphere Service Registry and Repository helps to maximize the efficiency of investment in SOA initiatives by automatically provisioning into IBM WSRR services that have been planned and prioritized according to strategic business and IT objectives. It helps management identify candidate services and build an SOA roadmap through SOA Modeling, Asset Identification, and a Portfolio Management process. To achieve these goals Portfolio Manager functions as part of a unified SOA Governance automation product family for IBM WSRR with seamless integration with IBM WSRR and SOA Software’s Policy Manager for IBM WSRR.
IBM, which has also intensified WSRR’s focus on delivering SOA governance benefits to business needs, welcomed the new offering.
“SOA Software’s Portfolio Manager for IBM WSRR will complement our strong service lifecycle management capabilities helping our customers identify candidate enterprise services built with and running on any heterogeneous platforms,” said Dr. Angel Luis Diaz, IBM’s vice president for BPM and Connectivity, in a statement. The combination, Diaz added will allow customers to better “continuously automate and govern their business processes. Especially in today’s economic and hyper-competitive environment, this optimizes productivity and resources needed to achieve business agility.”
