BEA snaps up metadata registry tech

When Mercury Interactive plunked down $105 million for Systinet last January, that left just two prominent pure-play vendors of SOA registry/repositories standing: Infravio and Flashline. That number was cut by half last week, when BEA Systems bought Flashline for an undisclosed sum.

BEA will add Flashline’s product to its AquaLogic line as the BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository, giving its customers a place to store metadata about services and to govern SOA deployments across the enterprise. Better repository integration is a necessity as SOAs move from planning and development to deployment, said BEA CTO Rob Levy. 

Combined with the AquaLogic Service Registry, an OEM version of Systinet’s technology, Flashline’s repository will allow BEA customers to manage the SOA lifecycle from initial planning through deployment and ongoing maintenance, said Paul Patrick, chief architect of AquaLogic at BEA.

“Managing SOAs devolves to managing the metadata that [SOAs] instantiates, and governing SOA is about governing metadata,” said Flashline CEO Charles Stack.

SOA vendors such as BEA, IBM, and Oracle have tended to partner with pure-play vendors until now, despite the critical role that registries and repositories play. The BEA acquisition is one indication of the trend toward more comprehensive single-vendor SOA solutions; IBM’s WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, due for release in October, is another.

“Once BEA [gets] their repository integrated with their infrastructure, they’re going to be a step ahead,” said Jess Thompson, research vice president at Gartner. “IBM and Oracle are both headed that way, so it will come down to how much they want to spend to get there and in what amount of time,” he said.

Meanwhile, Miko Matsumura, vice president of technology standards at Infravio, suggests that integrating BEA’s current registry with the Flashline repository will be hard work. As BEA, IBM, and Oracle snap up more and more SOA-related vendors, the problem of unifying these towering SOA stacks may persist for awhile.

Nonetheless, according to Gartner’s Thompson, the need for SOA governance tools is pressing. “Infrastructure vendors are starting to pile up customer requests that can only be solved by managing the metadata associated with the large number of artifacts that go into [SOAs],” he said.