Dueling SOA governance initiatives questioned

Does the world really need two separate industry initiatives devoted to interoperability in SOA governance?

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Panelists from technology companies in the governance space debated this question at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference on Thursday. The two initiatives under the spotlight included the Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF) and SOA Link, each of which is geared toward registries by the companies that began the initiatives, Systinet and Infravio.

GIF was founded by Systinet in April 2005. It features companies such as Actional, Hewlett-Packard, and Reactivity. SOA Link was organized by Infravio and counts as participants companies such as, once again, HP, along with Iona and JBoss. The initiative's formal unveiling happened last month.

Both Infravio and Systinet were represented on the SOA governance panel. Moderator Anne Thomas Manes, a Burton Group analyst, asked why there cannot be just one initiative.

Infravio's Miko Matsumura, vice president of marketing and technology standards at the company, said he would not necessarily comment on why there needs to be two efforts. "Everyone is familiar with our economic system and clearly, competition is something that helps enrich everybody's products and provide choice for customers," he said.

After Matsumura explained SOA Link, noting its focus on governance interoperability, Manes said the initiative sounds like GIF. "Why is it that you didn't just join GIF?" said Manes, noting she herself had worked at Systinet.

Matsumura responded, "I had a conversation with the Systinet guys and I think we just decided it didn't make sense for us at the time and that is that."

Systinet's founder and Vice President of Products, Roman Stanek, said it would be up to consumers and partners to decide what to support. A GIF 2 release is being developed, to feature a more extensive set of APIs and standards.

But panelist Charles Stack, CEO of Flashline, shot back, "It doesn't benefit to have a standard that is not a standard."

GIF is to be submitted to a standards body, Stanek responded.

"The goal of GIF and the goal of SOA Link is actually to make the whole lifecycle visible," Stanek said. Systinet is now owned by Mercury Interactive, after an acquisition announced in January.

Panelist Brent Carlson, vice president of technology at LogicLibrary, said major vendors would forcefully put their own stamps on governance. "They will put their fingerprints all over the place," he said. Stanek said GIF does have the backing of HP and BEA Systems.

In other discussions, panelists cited definitions of SOA governance. "The most accurate approach to SOA is it's really two different things," Charles Stack said. Governance features a macro level, to ensure that the right services are built, as well as a lower, micro level in which services are built to be interoperable, to comply with standards and to be secure, he said.

"SOA governance; you can certainly Google it and you'll find a lot of different answers," said panelist Gregg Bjork, CEO of WebLayers.

Also at the conference, Benjamin Moreland, director of foundation services at The Harford insurance company, cited his company’s SOA strategy.

"What we have learned at The Hartford is SOA is much broader than standards and technology," Moreland said.

"The focus [at] The Hartford is on architecture and it's on standards and on business agility. We have never done SOA for the sake of SOA," said Moreland. Rather, SOA has been driven from a business perspective, he said.

In building an SOA, The Hartford sought to lower IT costs, increase the ease of doing business, get a faster speed to market and increase agility. The company knows the independent agents it works with are driven by the ease of doing business.

"They will use the few [business partners] that they know so they can get the quote and service maintained very easily," said Moreland.

An SOA needs a reference architecture and governance processes, he said. An SOA moves away from monolithic applications but leverages existing systems. "The nice thing about SOA is it is not rip-and-replace," Moreland said.

The Hartford's SOA features technology such as SOAP, WSDL, XML, and a portal.

Web services management and security are valuable, Moreland said. "I don't think the vendors that sell these understand or are able to articulate the value," of these management platforms, said Moreland.