WebLayers Delivers Policy Infrastructure for SOA Governance
New release addresses need for policy-driven governance from design to deployment
Cambridge, MA, October 18, 2006 – WebLayers today announced WebLayers Center 3.5, the only vendor-neutral platform for policy infrastructure enabling enterprises to define, enforce, and audit policies across all of their existing systems to support the SOA lifecycle from design to deployment.
SOA governance is an extension of IT governance that requires the definition and enforcement of architectural standards and business policies to maintain order over the highly distributed nature of SOA. An effective SOA governance solution consists of many components, the most important of which is an independent policy infrastructure that interoperates with all of the systems across the SOA lifecycle. WebLayers Center 3.5, announced today, is built to support the unique requirements of SOA governance.
Enterprises without an effective governance solution are endorsing failure, particularly with the interdependencies that come from SOA,” said Gregg Bjork, CEO of WebLayers. Recent market surveys show that 70 percent of enterprises deploying SOA are enforcing governance manually and only 17 percent characterized their SOA governance strategy as sufficient. While SOA governance has been marketed by other vendors as add-on extensions to their registries/repositories, testing tools, and runtime management solutions, this data shows us that these tools are insufficient in providing a well coordinated, infrastructure independent layer of governance that is delivered by a policy infrastructure platform like WebLayers Center.”
Using a point solution for SOA governance, such as a policy manager embedded into a registry/repository product or Web service management tool, you are not aware of issues in the design and development phase and can react only after a new service is being published into the registry/repository or caught during runtime. You are also challenged governing multiple infrastructure components from various vendors. With this limited enforcement, project deadlines are missed and costs begin to skyrocket.
By providing continuous enforcement across the entire lifecycle, WebLayers provides the visibility to identify and resolve issues as they occur rather than just governing at specific transition points of a service lifecycle. Business and technical policies can be enforced in the design and development phase to provide the necessary guidance to get it right from day one.
Key Capabilities of WebLayers Center 3.5:
Jumpstart your SOA Initiative with Policy Libraries: Build a solid governance foundation from day one by leveraging the vast collection of policies derived from field engagements, industry best practices, and standards bodies such as W3C and WS-I. The WebLayers SOA Policy Library covers all of the SOA layers including application code, services, messaging, user interface and business documents.
Define and Manage Policies: Extend the pre-built policies with custom policies to address your specific business, technical, or architectural requirements. A collaborative policy platform enables the creation, configuration and management of policies throughout the enterprise with strong support for federation.
Continuous Enforcement Across the Lifecycle: Non-invasive enforcement agents that transparently examine and enforce compliance across all layers of your existing infrastructure including development tools, registries, repositories, development processes, and applications.
Coverage for all SOA Layers: Throughout the SOA lifecycle, many infrastructure components generate unique document types, artifacts, and supporting code. WebLayers Center provides pre-built policies and governance for all of these SOA Layers including: Project Documents (e.g. MS Word, Excel, Visio, Text); Design artifacts; User Interface artifacts (e.g. HTML); Messaging artifacts (e.g. XML, SOAP); Service description (e.g. WSDL, Schema); and Code Artifacts (e.g. Java).
Enterprise Visibility and Auditing: Management Dashboards with a comprehensive set of drill-down reports to provide IT stakeholders with business impact analysis, and compliance information in both summary and detailed perspectives.
About WebLayers
WebLayers (http://www.weblayers.com) is a leader in policy-driven SOA. WebLayers Center, the company’s flagship product, is deployed to define their enterprise polices, detect, analyze, and ensure conformance and to govern their most strategic IT initiatives.
WebLayers is the founder and coordinator of The SOA Forum. The SOA Forum is comprised of senior IT executives and enterprise architects from Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Current members include over 1,000 senior IT executives and enterprise architects.