Software AG offering SOA policy control

Software AG on Thursday plans to announce its Active Governance Framework (AGF), which features a policy editor for SOA.

With AGF, developers can edit and enforce business and technical policies. Alerts are sent to business users when an application conflicts with an established policy.

The policy editor plugs into the CentraSite SOA registry and repository, which keeps track of SOA artifacts, including Web services. CentraSite was developed by both Software AG and Fujitsu.

“What’s great about the pluggable architecture is that first of all, we can very, very quickly enhance the product without going through major release cycles,” said Matt Durham, vice president of market development at Software AG.

Through the policy editor, developers can take ad hoc or proprietary policies, such as policy written in a Word document, and copy and enforce them.

An example of a business policy that could be enforced would be a policy on who is allowed to fly at a certain class. A technical policy could involve, for example, making one service usage contingent on another service.

Wiki-based collaboration capabilities are featured in AGF. Also part of AGF is the ability to synchronize with policies managed within third-party tools such as a tool for security.

Advanced federation in AGF allow for cross-registry communication and is based on the UDDI standard.

The AGF plugin is slated to be available in the second quarter of this year. CentraSite is part of the Software AG crossvision SOA suite, but users do not need to purchase the whole suite.