iTKO said Monday it had joined SOA Link, what it called “an initiative for the purpose of making multiple SOA product vendors’ offerings interoperable”. The move bulks up SOA Link, which includes companies such as AmberPoint, HP, Infravio, IONA, JBoss, NetIQ, Parasoft, and webMethods. Rival group Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF) includes companies such as Actional, Hewlett-Packard, and Reactivity.Panelists from technology companies in the governance space debated whether two groups were needed at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference last month. By joining SOA Link, iTKO, which provides complete testing solutions for SOA, said in a statement it plans to promote the concept “that everyone should own quality and should be working to enhance the quality of SOA applications”. It said SOA Link participants benefited by having the ability to publish services and policy in a standardized way, and by being alerted to changes. “SOA Link gets to the heart of what we have been trying to accomplish,” said Jim Mackay, chief marketing officer, iTKO, Inc. “While the current standards enable widespread adoption of SOA, supporting the ever-growing set of integration points between the elements of the infrastructure increases the complexity and risk of enterprise development. “SOA Link ensures that all of these organizations work together for interoperability so the end user will be able to better integrate Service Oriented Architectures into their businesses. It is a win-win for everyone involved.”The company said that a customer buying SOA Link solutions can be assured they will work together to solve the problem of end-to-end SOA Lifecycle Governance. Miko Matsumura, vice president of technology standards at Infravio, Inc. (organizer of the SOA Link initiative), said: “The more quality vendors that we can get to work together and publish services, the more widely adopted SOAs will become.”But, despite the bulking up, no standard remains for SOA interoperability as long as two groups operate independently. As one panelist at the conference last month said, “It doesn’t benefit to have a standard that is not a standard.”Can’t we all just get along, SOA players? Talk back to us… Technology Industry