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SOA Entry Points

New to SOA?? Dont know where to start? Then IBM's SOA entry points is the best place to start with to read more about how you should start with SOA. Remember SOA is not just for the big guys but also for the small and medium sized companies. Actually, I look at SOA as one of the best things ever that could happen to the SMB companies. There is no better time to jump into this, if you have not already gotten into this in some form or fashion. Jump in..

SOA entry points talks about the 5 entry points into SOA. Any one of IBM's five entry points can provide an effective and efficient way to get started with SOA. Read more about that here.

Cheers,
Steve Lokam

Top of Mind SOA Governance Products

I have recently been to the webMethods integration world 2006 and I saw the demo of the Infravio product there. You heard the news about Infravio being acquired by webMethods. I think that is one of the best things that they have done in the recent past. Infravio is one of the best vendors that I have seen for SOA governance. They are a pure-play SOA governance vendors. They flagship product "X-Registry" is a great tool for Design-Time and Run-Time management of your SOA environment. Now, webMethods has a complete offering of SOA development and governance tools.

IBM's WebSphere Services Registry and Repository (WSRR) is the WebSphere's version of the product to govern your SOA environment. I have not seen this in action myself, but heard some good stuff about this. I dont know why IBM always makes our life complicated, but we have to use a varied set of tools for the entire SOA governance. The best part with IBM of course is the broader coverage in terms of SOA governance, that no other software vendor could match. Not only that,  these tools integrate very well with their SOA offerings: WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Process Server products.

Pure-play vendors like Infravio, Systinet, Amber Point are doing so well because of the very reason that they focus mainly on the governance aspect of it and they do it very well. I am sure TIBCO also offers a SOA goveranance tool, but it is not on top of my mind as of now. I have figure what it is though.

Well, these are the products that are on top of mind for me in terms of SOA governance. I foresee a lot more consolidation of these vendors.

Cheers,
Steve Lokam

SOA Validation, Testing

Companies out there are building a ton of services for application to consume these services. They are growing crazy in corporate environments. I am sure they are worried about governing them right, by setting proper policies and business rules around these services. While SOA governance is one aspect of building the services, testing them before deploying them is becoming critical these days. Software vendors call this new QA paradigm as "SOA Validation", "SOA Testing" among other names. However, the main point of it is about testing your Web Services (QA tools for Web Services testing).

Some of the vendors that I always stumble upon in this space include: Mindreef (my favorite - I have seen their product in action), Amber Point, Solstice Software among my top of mind vendors.

I guess players like Systinet, Mercury (Now HP) and Rational (IBM) are going to play in this space and though they say they have products in this space, I feel that they are not as pure play as these other vendors that I just mentioned.

SOA validation or SOA testing has been a topic in a lot of my recent SOA conversations with customers. Looks like this could take off in a big way soon.

Cheers,
Steve Lokam