Mercury updates SOA products

SOA — “service-oriented architecture” or “state of anarchy”? The question is starting to weigh on SOA vendors large and small, as the number and complexity of SOA deployments run smack up against compliance and IT governance requirements in the enterprise. On Monday, Mercury Interactive will use the Mercury World 2006 conference in Las Vegas to provide an answer, unveiling a strategy called BTO (Business Technology Optimization) for SOA.

“What we’re trying to do with BTO for SOA is mitigate the business risks, so you can get the original value that you’re trying to get to,” said Christopher Lochhead, Mercury’s chief marketing officer.

Mercury’s latest product updates will control services that cannot consistently be reused and that violate compliance standards and decrease the work required to test or modify functions, executives said.

A new version of the Systinet 2 SOA governance platform, Version 2.1, will add dashboards to configure views of an environment and out-of-the-box reports for functions such as service lifecycle reporting and relationship dependencies as well as RSS publishing capabilities.

To test services, Mercury Service Test Management, a module within Mercury Quality Center, conducts service tests for technical and business functionality and integrates the testing process.

SOA has always promised better, faster, and cheaper application services, but that promise doesn’t come without risks, the company stressed. As enterprises deploy a large number of rapidly changing, small services instead of a small number of large applications, the risks of conflicts and violations of compliance standards grow, as does the overhead of testing SOA services.

Ben Hastings, performance testing technical lead at Reed Elsevier, a global publishing company that has deployed an SOA and uses Mercury products, said, “Governance is something that’s become a great concern within our organization primarily because of the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.