This is a reality with which users must come to grips, according to Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC.

“Loose coupling as a whole makes the management and usage planning a lot more difficult, but that’s the price you pay for variability,” he said. “You can’t have variability and flexibility without the need to manage and respond to changes. So, management, quality and governance all have to greatly increase their ability to deal with unpredictable changes without (the currently predictable) failure. So, the whole idea of SLA management changes when you move to systems that are flexible and variable. This is not even SOA specific.”

Schmelzer said the move into service management makes sense for Tibco, noting that most SOA platform vendors are looking to branch into this area.

“We see that Management is a core part of the Governance-Quality-Management (GQM) trifecta for SOA, which is the real infrastructure of necessity for SOA,” he said. “We see the ESB as not particularly necessary to run successful SOA for a number of reasons, but on the other hand, we see GQM as an absolutely necessary part of the SOA infrastructure for a few reasons. The idea of loose coupling is that users anywhere can create and consume services at their sole demand. That means there’s a high potential for chaos. To reign in runtime and design time chaos, governance imposes policies and controls. To make sure that the system continues to operate as planned, quality solutions continuously test and verify the system. To make sure the system continues to respond to changing requests, management solutions continuously monitor and intermediate service requests to guarantee operations.”

Read more at: SearchSOA