Vendors Launch 'SOA Link' to Increase Interoperability, Adoption

Published: May 10, 2006

by Alex Woodie

A group of service oriented architecture (SOA)-related software vendors came together last week and pledged to make their products work together better. The new "governance interoperability" program, dubbed SOA Link by Infravio, which is spearheading the program, aims to help users separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to choosing tools for building, executing, managing, and securing business applications in an SOA environment--and to boost the fortunes of SOA software developers along the way.

There is no doubt that the SOA concept has a garnered a lot of attention in the IT industry over the past few years. After all, the benefits of SOA are potentially huge--i.e., full separation of business logic, data, and interface combined with an Internet delivery method and guaranteed system-to-system interoperability, giving customers an "a la carte" menu of business processes to choose from. These benefits should be especially appealing to users of so-called "legacy" computer systems and development languages that could get many more years of useful service by hooking aging applications into an SOA and delivery them as Web services.

But whether this theoretical possibility will actually work in practice has yet to be proved in widespread fashion. SOA hasn't fully outgrown its early reputation as being more of a marketing buzzword than an actual technology you'd want to bet your business on. This perception is damaging to the SOA technology vendors, who are doing real work and making legitimate breakthroughs that could, someday, lead to a revolution in IT. To help alleviate this fear, some of the most promising up-and-coming vendors in this space banded together to create SOA Link.

SOA Link

SOA Link is an interoperability program created by Infravio to help users make intelligent buying decisions when it comes to outfitting their SOAs with tools. Infravio's X-Registry platform for cataloging the thousands of Web services that some companies already have in place is one of the products on the SOA Link list..

Here's how the SOA Link program works, according to the SOA Link Web site at www.soalink.com. An SOA Link can be categorized in one of three states: planned, in-development, or validated. Vendors start at the bottom rung, planned, when they join the program and announce their willingness to ensure interoperability with other members of SOA Link. After work begins on integrating one product to another product listed in the SOA Link, it gains the "in-development" rating. Only end users can validate an "in-development" link, and products must be successfully hooked up to at least two products in the SOA Link catalog before it gains the "validated" certification. Infravio's X-Registry is the obvious first choice for SOA Link members to hook into, but the requirement for a second proven integration should assure ongoing development. End users can join the organization for free, and post comments on members' products.

When SOA Link launched May 1, there were 15 software vendors listed as members. These included Infravio; AmberPoint, which writes software for managing and securing SOA applications; Composite Software, an SOA development and runtime tool maker; Web services security software developer Forum Systems; Intalio, which writes software for designing new business process flows from existing systems, and then executing them; IONA, an enterprise system bus (ESB) developer; JBoss, an open-source Web application server vendor (which Red Hat is in the process of buying); Layer 7 Technologies, developer of Web services security products; LogicBlaze, which bills itself as the only provider of an entire SOA stack that's open-source; multi-platform security software vendor NetIQ, which is in the process of being acquired by AttachmateWRQ; test tool maker ParaSoft; XML traffic security vendor Reactivity; SOA development and management tool vendor SOA Software; ESB provider SymphonySoft; and webMethods, one of the dominant enterprise-strength integration software developers.

Noticeably absent from this list are the major platform vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Novell, and Sun Microsystems. Each of these vendors has its own strategy and suite of tools for building SOAs, or partnerships with vendors for these tools. SOA Link is largely a play by smaller vendors to foster product interoperability and choice, which may or may not be on the agendas of the titans of IT.

By banding together through SOA Link, these vendors are stronger as a whole than as individual members. "No one company can offer all the pieces of a fully functional SOA," says David Besemer, chief technology officer of Composite Software of San Mateo, California.

Larry Alston, vice president of marketing and product management at IONA, agrees. "We are a strong advocate of this technology agnostic approach to SOA," he says. "Participating in an initiative such as SOA Link helps provide further peace of mind to our customers as they make their SOA infrastructure buying decisions."

In the end, survival of SOA vendors depends upon interoperability--and breaking the notion that SOA is just hype. "In the early stages of a technology wave, enterprises need reassurances that technologies will work together," says James Governor, principal analyst at technology analyst RedMonk. "SOA Link brings together some key vendors to assure just that, by establishing a community of common interest."

In other news, Infravio announced the general availability of a new release of its flagship product, X-Registry Platform 6. The new release features new policy authoring and control systems for setting and enforcing the policies that dictate how the various users and parties in an SOA-enabled workflow will act. New federation support in the product helps to streamline the synchronization, promotion, and versioning processes that participants must follow. A new approval engine, more auditing and reporting capabilities, and, last but not least, support for SOA Link round out the release.

For more information, visit www.infravio.com or www.soalink.com.