SOA Software announced the launch of an SOA governance product called Workbench. Workbench is closed-loop SOA governance product, integrating UDDIv3 registry technology with a repository and policy management system. This solution provides a way for organizations to quantifiably enforce their run-time policies, accelerating service reuse and adoption.

"As enterprises increasingly adopt and scale out their SOA-based implementations, the need to manage and assure services policy adherence in a more integrated and automated fashion across the IT lifecycle becomes crucial," notes Sandra Rogers, director of SOA and Web services research at IDC. "Beyond developing reference architectures and governance guidelines, organizations are seeking techniques to help facilitate more reliable adherence to corporate or contractual specifications."

Governance intersects with SOA security and management around centralized SOA policy management and reporting. Customers need SOA governance to:

• Control the proliferation of services.
  
  
• Measure and manage the value of the SOA.
  
  
• Control the relationships between consumers and providers.
  
  
• Make it easier for developers of services and consumers to participate in SOA.
  
  
• Manage and enforce design-time and run-time policies and report on policy compliance.

"SOA governance requires not just definition of policies, but also enforcement of policies and auditing of the enforcement of those policies," said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. "A comprehensive SOA governance solution must support all three aspects of policy management (definition, enforcement and auditing). Otherwise an organization will have no means to measure the effectiveness of the governance solution or the value that the SOA initiative provides."

SOA Software's Workbench is a standalone SOA governance system offering features including:

• Support for UDDIv3 -- Publish and discover services, and synchronization with 3rd party UDDIv3 registries.
  
  
• Design-time policy management for WS-I and enterprise architecture policy compliance.
  
  
• Run-time policy lifecycle management.
  
  
• Service publishing workflow.
  
  
• Service discovery and access provisioning workflow.
  
  
• Active consumer contracts managing the relationships between applications.
  
  
• Contextual collaboration.

Workbench can also be deployed alongside Service Manager, SOA Software's SOA management and security product to provide a comprehensive closed-loop governance system. Workbench defines policies that are enforced (physically actioned) by the Service Manager run-time security and management systems. Service Manager collects metrics and compliance data (manifests) that it passes back to Workbench which implements an audit process comparing these metrics and manifests with the original policies to ensure that they are being correctly enforced.

SOA Software has worked closely with several Fortune 500 customers to develop the requirements for Workbench as a comprehensive enterprise-class, closed-loop SOA governance solution. This ensures that Workbench will prove valuable to both IT and the business in a wide range of organizations.

"SOA Software continues to win marquee customers, delivering the strongest products in the market," said Paul Gigg, chief executive officer of SOA Software. "The launch of Workbench announces our arrival in the SOA governance market, and marks a significant milestone on our path to be the dominant, platform-independent software company in the SOA arena."

Workbench will be generally available in January 2007 with a technology preview in December 2006.