I’m tuned into an ebizQ webinar on SOA standards, News Break: The First Standards-Based SOA Forum to Manage and Govern Your SOA. This link should be good for replay within a couple of hours after the webinar, or within a couple of days if you want the full version with the live Q&A. By the way, whatever happened to the link that would add the webinar directly to my Outlook calendar? I miss that! I’m simultaneously blogging (obviously), packing for my trip to Mashup Camp and listening to the fire alarms being tested in my building, so this may not be as detailed as usual.
The presenters are Keith Swenson of Fujitsu (who I’ve met a couple of times), Daryl Plummer of Gartner (who I heard speak at their BPM Summit earlier this year), Paul Butterworth of AmberPoint, Peter Kuerpick of Software AG and Jean Francois Abramatic of ILOG. The blurb for the webinar promised:
[A]n exciting multi-vendor announcement on how the leading SOA vendors are partnering to achieve a common SOA infrastructure. This initiative will leverage an open, standards based SOA registry and repository to manage and govern the complete SOA landscape. It will allow you to analyze interdependencies in your SOA including services, processes, applications and other SOA components.
In other words, now that most vendors have figured out that most customers are not going to be using a single-vendor SOA infrastructure, they’re getting together to build some standards in the area of registry and repository.
Plummer started with a message about the importance of SOA governance, and the recent focus on this by many organizations. He stepped through Gartner’s models of an SOA framework and service registry, and touched on policy management and a few other governance-related issues. He laid a lot of the groundwork for the rest of the webinar, since SOA governance is a key driver for standards.
Up next were Kuerpick and Swenson, the two webinar sponsors, to talk about the CentraSite Community, with is both a standards-based SOA forum and a product that provides an open registry and repository, impact analysis tools, and governance tools that store, tracks and analyze processes and their underlying services and interdependencies. They launched a canned demo of CentraSite that is also available on the site, which happens at just below light-speed, so I’ll need another viewing to catch all the details, but it appears to be all browser-based and has some interesting functionality especially around interdependencies of services. CentraSite is already supported by several vendors, and any standards-based vendor should be able to publish directly to it but would need to get a bit more involved to be a full player. It will be interesting to see how this catches on over the coming months, and if it manages to sort out some of the SOA confusion.
One really interesting point is that both XPDL and BPEL are mentioned explicitly, and BPMN was also mentioned although it’s not on the slides and isn’t used in representing business processes within CentraSite as far as I could see in the demo. CentraSite is not a standards organizations, and much of the underlying standards work will be done by the existing standards bodies such as OASIS.
There is a community edition that is free of charge, and you can register to download a product evaluation.
More to come on this in the future, I’m sure.