SOA metadata technology spurs webMethods to buy Cerebra

However, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, was skeptical about how much automation will be possible in building a metadata repository.

“On the one hand, dealing with semantic metadata is a critical missing link for SOA, so yes, it’s an important part of a successful SOA implementation,” Bloomberg said. “But while Cerebra can provide some level of automation, there always remain many issues that must be resolved manually.”

Bloomberg also contested webMethods’ assertion that Cerebra’s technology is unique, by pointing to Metallect Corp., a Dallas, Texas-based startup, which he said, offers “a semantic metadata management capability similar to Cerebra’s.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

SOA Reuse Governance

This 27-slide PowerPoint presented in pdf format discusses the challenges of SOA and how they relate to SOA Governance. It discusses SOA Governance “in the narrow” and “in the broad” and introduces the concept of SOA Reuse Governance — creating, communicating, and enforcing Service reuse policies in the enterprise.

Metallect: Reuse Governance for Service-Oriented Architecture

Building a governance framework is an essential step in any Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation. Proper governance involves the creation and communication of policies, tools for policy compliance, and visibility and enforcement of policies. SOA governance not only applies the rigors of governance to SOA, but also leverages the benefits of SOA for overall IT governance.

One of the key benefits of SOA that governance must address is how to control the reuse of Service assets, and the ability for different consumers to share Services, leading to reduced redundancy and greater flexibility. While there are an increasing number of SOA governance products on the market, few specificially address reuse governance. One notable exception is the Metallect IQ Server, an Enterprise Application Visibility tool that provides reuse governance capabilities as part of a SOA governance framework.

2005 a Record-Setting Year for LogicLibrary

ZapThink, LLC said Logidex improves efficiency and reuse of assets across an organization.

Read more at: Business Wire

Startups swimming against Web services management tide

A research report from ZapThink LLC of Waltham, Mass., released this week said that even if startups are successful in the growing market, they’re likely to become targets of opportunity for big players like Computer Associates International Inc., Hewlett-Packard Company and IBM.

ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg offered in the report strategies for startups like Flamenco Networks, Infravio, Blue Titan Software and Westbridge Technology Inc. He also predicts the market will consolidate by next year when the incumbent “big players” fuse the market into three or four major companies.

“It showed in our report that a lot of these vendors are looking for niches where they can offer value to their customers, so they tend to offer a bunch of different things,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: TechTarget

Web Services Management

Of all the markets that the rush to capitalize on Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) spawned, the space known as Web Services Management (WSM) is likely the most turbulent. Marked by a large number of new entrant vendors and cutthroat competition for a steadily increasing number of customers, WSM products have come to offer a core set of functionality as well as many of the key capabilities necessary for companies to build and run SOAs.

In spite of significant press and early adopter attention to the vendors in this space, there have been too many vendors chasing too few deals, and as a result, most WSM vendors have reconfigured their product and marketing strategies at least once, as they seek the right niche to build the customer traction so critical to their survival. As a result, the WSM market is filled with short-term fragmentation, as vendors jockey for position, and longer-term consolidation, as incumbent vendors make strategic acquisitions and build their WSM capabilities as the market matures.

This report provides WSM vendors with the perspective they need to focus their market and product strategies for the next one to two years, and it illustrates the complete WSM landscape for end-users, enabling them to understand which vendors will be able to provide the capabilities they require, both now and as they build out their Service-Oriented Architectures.

ZapThink: Web Services Management Market Set To Expand Dramatically; Growth Tempered by Fragmentation of Market Leading to Dominance by Incumbent Vendors

“Companies are coming to understand that Web Services Management is critical for both the operation of Web Services as well as SOAs,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst with ZapThink. “As a result, vendors in this space are finding customer traction by offering a range of different capabilities, from monitoring, to SOA enablement, to metadata management.”

Read more at: BusinessWire

Web Services Management Market Poised For Consolidation

“Management vendors are adding security, process vendors are adding management and integration vendors are adding management and security,” Bloomberg said. “Everyone is adding functionality from other areas.”

“Web services management is not really a separate market long term, because the big boys are going to begin adding those capabilities to their products,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: TechWeb

Web Services Players Primed for Acquisitions

Analysts with an XML and Web services research firm have concluded that the busy Web services management sector has become fragmented and is primed for consolidation in the near future.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the sector, according to ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg.

“What’s happening is the players in the space have been shifting around, trying to find that appropriate niche, that customer pain that they can address better than anyone else,” he said. “The category of Web services management is becoming less and less well defined as the vendors who had identified themselves in that category are now addressing different sets of problems.”

According to Bloomberg, companies building software to manage runtime requirements for service-oriented architectures (define) are gaining traction, largely because they have zeroed in on specific areas of the Web services management space.

Read more at: Internetnews

Metadata: The Lifeblood of the SOA

Enterprises need information and application visibility across their IT environment, regardless of how far along they are in their plans to implement an enterprise-wide Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Without visibility into the workings of the systems, applications, and other elements of their IT infrastructure, businesses are unable to manage or improve their IT environment, and most importantly, meet their business requirements.

Today, however, only a few companies have implemented SOAs. As companies build such architectures, the need for visibility becomes even more acute, because an SOA represents an abstraction layer that masks the complexity of the underlying technology while at the same time providing greater power and agility to the business user. Thus, in an SOA, both IT and business users require visibility into the workings of the SOA at some level.

The key to this visibility in both types of situations is metadata: information about the elements of the SOA. To provide adequate IT visibility, companies must follow basic metadata best practices for discovering and organizing metadata, encapsulating business logic in metadata, managing with metadata, and modeling with metadata. While there are many metadata management solutions on the market, few are able to provide the visibility needed for IT personnel in traditional integration environments, as well as those transitioning to and running SOAs. The IQ Server from Metallect is just such a solution.