A new suite of applications addresses the knotty problem of policy management for services What’s the difference between Web services and SOA? In a word, governance — the complex set of policies that establish how an organization’s services should be built and maintained. In an effort to place itself at the core of enterprise SOA efforts, Systinet today announced that it is shipping Systinet 2, a governance platform previously code-named Blizzard. The unveiling comes on the heels of Systinet’s acquisition by application management powerhouse Mercury Interactive.The Systinet 2 platform builds on the popular Systinet Registry, a UDDI-compliant product that gains some significant UI enhancements in the new 6.5 version. The previous version, 6.0, featured the first implementation of Systinet’s Governance Interoperability Framework, a set of APIs for sharing governance metadata endorsed by Actional, AmberPoint, Hewlett-Packard, Layer 7 Technologies, and others.Brand new in Systinet 2 are Contract Manager, an app to establish SLAs between service providers and consumers, and Information Manager, a repository for managing SOA metadata and artifacts plus a set of tools for maintaining relationships between services. Late to the party will be Policy Manager, arriving late Q1, which is designed to ensure that all services meet an enterprise’s policy creation, lifecycle, and validation standards. Systinet seeks to offer a foundation for service reuse, business agility, and alignment of business goals with IT, said Jake Sorofman, vice president of marketing at Systinet. “It’s extending upon our success with our registry product, introducing a repository for managing metadata and managing relationships between service artifacts,” he said. Software Development