SOA Governance: Software AG touts automated method for making services reusable

-- Manufacturing Business Technology, 11/28/2007 5:58:00 AM

Software AG is making a bid to become a leading supplier of service-oriented architecture (SOA) management tools with the recent release of its CentraSite Governance Edition suite.
This package, made up largely of products Software AG picked up in its acquisition of enterprise application integration specialist webMethods, is billed as a comprehensive, standards-based solution for managing and governing the services, processes, policies and business rules associated with SOA.
When managed appropriately, SOA improves business agility while reducing operational costs by enabling the structured reuse of existing IT assets within new, business-driven applications and processes. But many enterprises have been unable to take full advantage of the reuse capabilities inherent in an SOA because they have not learned to properly manage underlying complexities and interdependencies inherent in this more granular approach to application development.
Software AG claims its CentraSite suite addresses this problem by allowing companies to institute an automated approach to SOA governance. This approach will enable companies to adopt best practices for managing and reusing services as soon as they adopt an SOA, the company claims.
In announcing the release of CentraSite, Software AG said the features and functionality within the package reflect the experiences that more than 150 large enterprises have had in establishing policies and procedures for managing SOA.
"Enterprise users of SOA want to minimize complexity, simplify adoption and demonstrate faster payback.  With the release of the CentraSite Governance Edition, we're squarely addressing each of these concerns,” said Peter Kürpick, Chief Product Officer of the webMethods business division at Software AG.
Key features and enhancements within CentraSite Governance Edition include:
•Active Policy(TM) – Automates SOA processes, including validation, provisioning, registration of services and service change management, to accelerate deployment while ensuring quality control. By doing so, it simplifies end-user adoption, improves productivity and delivers a more robust SOA.
•Best Practices – Pre-loaded with more than eighty pre-defined best practices that streamline end-user adoption.
•Unified Lifecycle Governance – Enables seamless asset lifecycle governance via consistent enforcement of policies across design-time, run-time AND change-time environments.
•Enhanced Repository – Expands service reuse via universal availability of service definitions and histories, and policy documents.
•Open Metadata Model – Allows customers to model and govern all types of reusable SOA assets - from Web services to CORBA services to BPEL processes.  This facilitates closer alignment with business objectives by bringing simplicity to the creation of business-specific metadata definitions, service classifications, and associated policies.
•Enhanced Change-Time Governance – Richer, interactive impact analysis improves agility as well as service reliability and availability by allowing users to more quickly and easily assess the impact of proposed changes on downstream relationships.
•Intuitive User Interface – By combining a single view of the SOA landscape with a rich AJAX-based Web 2.0 interface, CentraSite Governance Edition simplifies the creation, deployment and management of services-based solutions.  This more intuitive workflow and streamlined navigation can integrate even occasional users with limited experience fully into the service governance lifecycle.
•Customized Views – Role-based service visibility minimizes complexity while allowing users to easily drill-down on areas of specific interest.
•SOA Federation – For mature SOA deployments that extend across multiple geographies and functional departments, CentraSite Governance Edition synchronizes governance processes and policy enforcement across disparate repositories and SOA infrastructure components, such as testing tools, SOA management products and security appliances.
•Open API and Standards Support – Extends access and policy enforcement control to third-party products, giving users the ability to more easily integrate and interoperate with third-party policy enforcement points. As a result, enterprises can more easily expose and manage SOA-based interactions with partners, customers and suppliers.
"The market demands SOA Governance solutions that span the full SOA lifecycle, that govern service assets beyond just Web services, and automate governance processes using sophisticated policy management capabilities for design, run and change-time governance,” says Ron Schmelzer, Managing Partner at ZapThink, LLC. ”Software AG's newest release addresses these capabilities and presents them in a user-friendly, intuitive interface that simplifies governance and helps IT accelerate SOA adoption.”