SOA Management Awash in Vendor Buzz

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Service-oriented architecture (SOA) management vendors upgraded their products this week to lure customers to the prospect of distributed computing.

The news coincides with Gartner’s Application Integration and Web Services Summit in San Diego this week, where vendors will talk about the way they plan to grab big pieces of the multi-billion-dollar market for software integration.

Systinet, acquired earlier this year by Mercury Interactive, unveiled Systinet Policy Manager 2.0, a piece of software that facilitates policy creation, management and compliance in an SOA.

SOAs (define)are distributed computing plans where companies often situate Web services (define)and reuse code and other assets to create efficiencies.

Vendors like IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Oracle and Mercury are creating SOA infrastructure platforms to speed information exchange between different computing machines.

While SOAs let different computing machines communicate, their architectures rely on complex multiple messaging that opens the door to messy code and broken communication, not to mention potential non-compliance with government regulations.

This is why businesses must set policies to protect who sees what information.

SOA policies are a set of guidelines for regulating proper behavior and operation of SOA-based services. SOA policies can be applied to medical records, personal and financial data.

Such data is malleable, so the policies have to be flexible, but tightly managed to ensure the right version of the policy is applied to the correct service at the proper time.

That’s where Systinet Policy Manager 2.0 comes in. The software lets customers move traditional, paper-based guidelines and rules into electronic SOA policies that can be shared, updated and reused.

The upgraded product provides a secure system for managing and reusing policies and associating policies with business services.

Systinet Policy Manager 2.0 can help companies express technical policies in business terms. It also employs wizards to automate policy-based processes and tests services for policy conformance.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.