BEA taps AmberPoint for SOA governance

Offering greater control over SOA, BEA Systems has enlisted AmberPoint to provide SOA runtime governance capabilities to users of BEA's middleware.

Under an arrangement being announced on Monday, BEA will rebrand and resell later this quarter the AmberPoint SOA Management System. It will be renamed AquaLogic SOA Management and serve as an expansion of the BEA AquaLogic product family.

The AmberPoint technology will provide policy management, discovery, dependency tracking, and service-level and exception management. BEA will support the product for its customers. Plans also call for fitting the product with a BEA installer.

"What this does is this adds the visibility and control that is necessary to be able to monitor and affect what is going on in an SOA environment," said Paul Patrick, BEA vice president and chief architect for AquaLogic.

Rather than develop its own governance technology in-house, BEA opted to extend an existing partnership with AmberPoint, which has already featured some integration between the two vendors' products.

Initially, AmberPoint's governance offering will function with the BEA WebLogic Server application server, AquaLogic Service Bus, and AquaLogic Service Registry. Afterward, it will be extended to support other AquaLogic and WebLogic products, such as AquaLogic Enterprise Repository.

An AmberPoint official noted the agreement provides tighter integration. "We get to work closely with BEA to make sure our product is integrated really tightly with their platform. It will be their product," said Ed Horst, AmberPoint vice president of marketing.

With AmberPoint, BEA gets a leading technology for its users, an analyst said. "The AmberPoint product is the leader in this space for a good reason. It's a really high-quality product," said analyst Anne Thomas Manes, vice president of research at Burton Group.

The AmberPoint technology utilizes a policy-based approach to managing loosely coupled systems, BEA said. Users can better understand system behavior in an SOA.

AmberPoint will still sell the product to non-BEA customers.