May 8th, 2006
SOA vendor consolidation ramps up
Today’s announcement of a merger between SOA Software and Blue Titan not only marks a ramp-up in vendor consolidation, but also reinforces the need for platform neutral infrastructure for truly enterprise-wide SOA implementations.
The new combined privately held company, which will take the SOA Software name, is betting that managing heterogeneity within SOA components and platforms will necessitate a common core infrastructure. That core will support the SOA platforms for purposes of coordination, meta data management, common policy creation and enforcement, and "tolerance" of multiple and overlapping SOA … well, stuff … within an enterprise-wide IT and services inventory.
The companies, by joining forces, are boldly declaring that policy of services is not the same as policy of the instances of SOA itself, and that perhaps the policy of SOA should be given precedence and perhaps later subsume all policy management vis a vis a federation approach.
In a sense, the combined offerings of Blue Titan and SOA Software provide a federation of SOAs capability. The companies say they will support any and multiple ESBs and UDDI instances, and so not be an integrator of integrators. I think of the move here by SOA Software of playing the role within SOAs that LDAP played as a common, standardized multi-purpose directory within n-tier distributed architectures. That is to form a common point among highly diverse and complex variables (not to mention standards) to add and enforce commonality and federation, and which in execution scales and remains manageable and secure.
Interesting approach.
Dana Gardner is principal analyst of Interarbor Solutions. For disclosures on Dana's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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