“Governance is really strong right now and for a couple of reasons,” said Ronald Schmelzer, sr. analyst and managing partner at ZapThink. “Companies are realizing that building services and putting them up there just won’t work. You want the services to be used and you want the main benefit of SOA, and that is reuse. But the flipside is, they may use these services in ways not anticipated.”

Schmelzer said Layer 7 has historically done a good job with policy definition and policy management.

Regarding SOA in the cloud, Schmelzer said he sees promising signs. Companies now are looking at SOA and realizing they may need to improve their architectures. “It looks like the trend is moving to an architectural focus,” said Schmelzer, “rather than IT managers just saying, ‘oh let’s just go buy another ESB.’”

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