SOA Software, a SOA and cloud services governance provider, announced Service Manager product version 6.0, designed to provide advanced virtualization, management, security, monitoring and mediation capabilities for SOA and cloud services, implemented using an OSGi-based architecture. "Private internal and private external cloud implementations probably make up the majority of what we are seeing in enterprises today," Alistair Farquharson, CTO for SOA Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "They definitely add another layer of governance automation to the mix - not only are you governing how applications should be built but where and how they are run. Enterprises are trying to save costs by automating as much of this infrastructure as possible and this creates risk without governance."
Service Manager, an SOA management and security product, delivers standards-based security, routing, mediation, monitoring, and management. Service manager implements and enforces policies, generates usage, performance and policy compliance metrics used to enable a closed-loop process for auditing and making sure policies are being correctly enforced.
Service Manager 6.0 delivers policy-based mediation for integration with multiple platforms, and provides an extensible binding framework, providing support for SOAP, REST and POX services. "Enterprise Services initiatives are about more than just SOAP Web services, they need to include REST, RSS, Atom and other web 2.0 and emerging technologies, such as cloud computing," Farquharson says.
The offering is intended to enforce and implement policies through advanced service virtualization, enabling enterprise service federation with SOA platforms like IBM WebSphere, Microsoft, Red Hat, SAP, and Oracle to create relevant and consumable service interfaces across any platform, policy, message type and transport.
In addition to the advanced support for policy enforcement and implementation, Service Manager 6.0 provides dynamic policy mediation, accepting messages for virtual services enforcing one policy, and send messages to physical services implementing different policies. This provides some sophisticated security token mediation capabilities, encryption and decryption, and signature verification and signing. Additionally, Service Manager 6.0 provides declarative binding and message exchange pattern mediation through its built-in JSR-208 JBI bus.
"Most customers have a good grasp of SOA principles these days. The implementation of these principles does take a long time because of the human element, but this is being helped by external factors such as cloud computing and social platforms that all work together to change people's attitudes," says Farquharson.
Service Manager 6.0 is based on the OSGi specification delivering exceptional operational readiness with automated online update capabilities, easy extensibility and proven performance and scalability for the world's most demanding enterprise and cloud services environments. "Well-executed OSGi encourages good architectural design and really forces developers to modularize and share at the component level," Farquharson explains. "This makes SOA and Cloud easier simply because the underlying architecture is more flexible."
Service Manager 6.0 will be available in Q2 2010, SOA Software says. For more information, go here.