SOA Software, a provider of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Governance, Security, Mediation, and Management solutions, announces a partnership with Microsoft to provide SOA Governance features for BizTalk Server 2006 R2.
On September 10, 2007, the company announced that it has extended its Workbench product with a comprehensive governance solution for Microsoft BizTalk Server. Working closely with Microsoft Corp. to deliver a closed-loop governance solution for BizTalk Server 2006 R2, SOA Software allows customers to confidently use BizTalk Server to automate mission critical business process, ensuring that the resulting applications are secure, reliable, and comply with enterprise and regulatory policies. By leveraging SOA Software's Workbench in conjunction with BizTalk Server 2006 R2, customers can consistently govern, secure, mediate and manage the policy and lifecycle of any type of SOA service deployed and accessed on any transport.
The Workbench product combines a UDDI v3 registry with a metadata repository. Registry and repository services can be accessed by a role-based web portal. The product specializes in a policy management solution including design-time and run-time policy features. These features help service designers, service developers, SOA architects, service owners, and stakeholders to manage the complete lifecycle of a services within the bounds of an Enterprise SOA Governance. Design-time policies for services define and manage service validation and conformance policies for service design and registration. Run-time policies for services define and manage security, routing, reliability, mediation. Metrics and according reports help to monitor performance and usage of services. Security and policy exceptions are tracked and reported, too.
SOA Software has been working with Microsoft for several months in order to develop end-to-end SOA governance monitoring and policy enforcement within BizTalk. The integration has been developed in accordance to the ESB Guidance project of Microsoft's patterns & practices team:
SOA Software's Workbench is deeply integrated with Microsoft's ESB Guidance Toolkit and offers essential governance capabilities for BizTalk Server:
- Closed-loop Governance - define, manage, and govern policies through a central registry/repository, enforce them through distributed service platforms such as BizTalk Server, and audit that the policies are being enforced.
- Uniform Policy Management - Workbench ensures that service consumed and provided by BizTalk Server enforce, implement, and comply with a common set of centrally defined and governed policies.
- Heterogeneous Governance Automation - Workbench provides comprehensive lifecycle management, policy management, and consumer management workflow capabilities to automate the governance processes for services exposed and consumed by BizTalk Server and any other enterprise service platform.
- Dynamic Policy Enforcement and Implementation - BizTalk Server, through Microsoft ESB Guidance, leverages Workbench's WS-MEX interfaces enabling dynamic policy discovery and implementation, as well as dynamic binding and end-point resolution
- Trust Mediation and Bridging - Workbench ensures seamless interoperability between the various security mechanisms used by the different platforms throughout the enterprise. It allows users to leverage desktop authentication mechanisms like Kerberos and smartcards, providing a mediation solution that ensures end-to-end single-sign-on with backend services provided by a wide range of enterprise platforms.
This partnership surely adds missing governance management to BizTalk Server 2006. Microsoft does not seem to have any plans for providing a SOA management solution on their own. They have already established a partnership with AmberPoint, another provider for SOA governance and management solutions. AmberPoint Express, AmberPoint's light-weight management solution, is bundled with Visual Studio 2005 Team System. The partnership with Microsoft is clearly beneficial for SOA Software. Integrating Workbench with BizTalk opens up the profitable ESB market.
