As organizations begin to adopt service-oriented architectures (SOA), the topic of SOA governance -- the articulation and enforcement of policies related to the lifecycles, implementation protocols, service access, information protection and service-level agreements of Web services -- is receiving an increasing amount of attention. ebizQ conducted this online survey in August 2006 in order to understand the current state of SOA adoption from the practitioner's point of view. Discover the surprising results.

SOA Worst Practices, Volume II: A Look at SOA governance, as the title suggests, is the follow-on white paper to SOA Worst Practices, Volume I: a collection, of dubious––and sometimes disastrous ––case studies of service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations. Each scenario describes and analyzes the critical SOA errors and lessons learned, and then a prescription is revealed to stimulate discussion and corrective possibilities.

To keep an SOA up and running smoothly and meet service-level agreements (SLAs), IT organizations must be able to monitor service interactions, understand dependencies, and quickly pinpoint the root causes of performance bottlenecks or failures. Learn how Progress Actional for SOA Operations can provide the key capabilities to reduce the risk of deployment. Register to download this free white paper.

Find out why runtime has become the focus of Web services management and SOA governance (vs. design time, development, staging and deployment). Learn how to simplify your life as you initiate your SOA; hint: start out by incrementally deploying Web services. Learn how to extract ROI from your SOA - maximizing it all the way. Examine these free SOA white papers from Actional - use cases, best practices and "worst practices" - and learn from our collective experience.

Companies with Progress Sonic ESB can enhance Sonic ESB management to ensure reliable operations across their entire SOA with Progress Actional software. Actional integrates with Sonic and provides end-to-end visibility across a Sonic ESB deployment and the infrastructure it connects. Highlights of Actional SOA management software include: * Extends operational visibility beyond the edge of Sonic ESB into connected infrastructure * Pinpoints the root cause of problems in distributed systems * Requires no change to existing ESB deployments * Incurs virtually zero operational overhead and latency

Progress Actional for Active Policy Enforcement addresses these issues while reducing IT costs. Actional decouples the SOA policy lifecycle from the service lifecycle to centralize the creation and management of SOA policy for security and compliance while ensuring distributed SOA policy enforcement. This empowers security and compliance experts to author policies once, apply them consistently across the SOA, and guarantee complete coverage for reduced risk. In addition, Actional for Active Policy Enforcement is designed to handle the full diversity of security and compliance requirements present within and beyond the boundaries of today's heterogeneous enterprises. It offers robust security across heterogeneous platforms and Web services standards—including support for WS-Security. It also simplifies compliance audits by recording audit data to a relational database, where it is available toany audit tool.

Progress Actional for SOA Operations is an SOA management tool for organizations that want a cost-effective, high-performance, scalable SOA runtime environment. It provides centralized management and end-to-end visibility into the dynamic, loosely coupled SOA environment necessitated by the move from application silos. Actional SOA Operations offers a non-invasive approach to monitoring and managing SOA operations. This is made possible through a unique Flow Mapping™ technology that provides global SOA views without much of the coding and manual configuration required by other solutions. As a result, with Actional you can better understand how services are being used and by whom, yet improve IT productivity and reduce SOA development time and costs. Actional also makes finding the root cause of policy violations, exceptions, and other service processing problems easy. Alerts are triggered by violations, automatically generating a snapshot of the actual transaction that caused the policy violation, making root cause analysis fast and accurate.

Progress Actional SOA solutions provide visibility, security, and control of the activities of services and end-to-end business processes in a runtime environment. They meet the challenges of keeping an SOA up and running successfully, in alignment with the business, and secure and compliant.

Organizations must ensure SOA security and compliance to protect their reputation and bottom line. Yet many companies tightly couple policies to the services to which they apply, putting the various IT teams responsible for the different services in charge of the related policies. This can lead to inconsistencies in policies and gaps in coverage, as well as high IT costs resulting from re-coding policies as services change and vice versa. Actional for Active Policy Enforcement is designed to handle the variety of SOA security and compliance requirements present in the extended enterprise. It provides flexible, standards-based support for authentication and authorization and integrates with a broad range of identify management and single sign-on (SSO) technologies. For compliance, it records audit data to a relational database, where it is available to any audit tools.

Because of the global competitive environment in which there is no room for IT problems, effective SOA performance monitoring and alerting are necessary to ensure reliable SOA operations. At the same time, SOA operations must be cost-effective. However, in the loosely coupled SOA world, services that are components of the same process execute across heterogeneous computing resources. Unlike traditional applications, there is no single group of systems dedicated to running a SOA process to easily monitor. As a result, how can organizations know what's happening—especially if there are performance and availability issues—in their SOA? Progress Actional products have a powerful yet cost-effective SOA performance monitoring and alerting solution that enables companies to operate their SOA reliably and meet SLAs: For monitoring, Actional's Flow Mapping™ technology auto-discovers and maps the process flow of all services in a SOA transaction end-to-end, revealing service dependencies. It provides this unprecedented visibility without the coding and manual configuration required by other solutions for end-to-end monitoring—lowering IT costs.

As the topology of an SOA becomes more complex, the challenge of fast, easy route cause analysis of any underlying IT infrastructure processing problems increases. Service performance and availability issues often appear in systems that may be upstream from the root cause. Full diagnostics require a roadmap of the problematic SOA transaction to address the issue and expedite problem resolution. Progress® Actional® for SOA Operations makes finding the root cause of exceptions, violations of business policies such as service-level agreements (SLAs), and other processing problems easy. When violations occur, along with sending an alert, Actional's Flow Mapping™ technology creates a flow map of the end-to-end problematic transaction.

To optimize their SOA investment and accomplish SOA business goals such as increasing business agility, organizations are turning to SOA governance. An effective SOA governance strategy must not only ensure that the behavior of project development teams is in-line with corporate goals; it also must address security and compliance issues that arise from regulations and business demands such as Sarbanes-Oxley, MIFID, and Visa PCI, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. And, finally, it must control rogue services. The Progress Actional product family complements governance tools such as registries and repositories and provides organizations with comprehensive runtime SOA governance capabilities from monitoring SOA operations, to improving business outcomes, to ensuring enforcement of security, compliance, and business policies and controlling rogue services.

To react faster to ever changing market dynamics, companies need to reconsider how they extend their SOA implementations and internal applications to integrate external data and functionality. Commercially available XML Web services can address these issues by providing plug-and-play functionality to access real-time, on-demand data and functionality. An eCommerce platform with tools and services specifically designed for Web services commercialization has enabled the emergence of a commercial Web services marketplace.

Cape Clear Software is today launching ESB University, a new education and training initiative aimed at providing software developers, systems integrators, and IT architects with the information and tools they need to ensure the success of their Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) projects. ESB University will offer a combination of live educational events, online tutorials, seminars, resources, and training sessions to support organizations in the design, development, deployment, and management of SOA and ESB projects. The university has been designed to accommodate the diverse needs of those who are responsible for creating a SOA strategy, designing and implementing SOA, and aiding business sponsors who need the increased business agility that SOA provides