SOA Software Inc. says its acquisition of LogicLibrary Inc., announced today, creates “a dominant Integrated SOA governance automation company.”

The two companies were both rated as leaders in respective governance areas by two major analyst firms, said Roberto Medrano, SOA Software’s executive vice president, in making the argument that the new whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

Pointing to a Gartner Inc. magic quadrant for “Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets” published at the end of 2007, he said, “Why do we say we’re leaders? It’s not because we say it. Gartner says SOA Software is a leader in SOA governance. LogicLibrary is there as a visionary. The combination of SOA Software as a leader and LogicLibrary as a visionary certainly puts us up there.”

Medrano then points to a Forrest Research Inc. wave chart for ”SOA Service Life-Cycle Management,” published in the first quarter 2008, which shows LogicLibrary and SOA Software in the running for leadership roles in a graphical scrum with IBM, Hewlett Packard Corp., and Software AG. BEA Systems Inc., now being acquired by Oracle Corp., rises above the rest in the Forrester view.

The acquisition of LogicLibrary by SOA Software follows a trend among governance vendors that is likely to continue, writes Dana Gardner, principal analyst of Interarbor Solutions LLC., in his blog today about the deal.

“The merger underscores not only the SOA vendor consolidation trend (ongoing), but also highlights the market driver of more end-to-end governance and management aspects of SOA deployments,” Gardner writes. “HP and TIBCO also had recent announcements that point up a wide and more automated approach to SOA governance/management.”

“What’s more,” Gardner added, ”I expect to see more of this ‘total management’ approach to SOA coming from the open source SOA infrastructure providers, too.”

The strength of the SOA Software/Logic Library combination, Medrano argues is that while the two companies are highly rated on the same analysts’ charts, their technologies are complementary, adding to the greater whole with little overlap.

“There is no real competition between us and LogicLibrary in terms of the assets and products that we have,” the SOA executive said. Concluding that with their product lines merged: “We become one of the few if not the only one that provides the entire SOA governance for all the enterprise assets.”

Alan Himler, who until today was CEO and chairman of LogicLibrary and is now senior vice president, product management for SOA Software, said the combined governance technologies cover more than Web services.

“The beauty of it is that it covers not just services but other types of assets,” he said. “We can offer a solution from the distributed level up to the mainframe.”

The executives of the two companies points to the individual technologies they offered:

SOA Software technology included:

• policy lifecycle governance
• SOA registry, service lifecycle, compliance policy
• operational governance
• service security, mediation, management, operational policy

LogicLibrary offered:

• SOA asset lifecycle management
• SOA development governance and SOA repository
• IDE and SCM integration

Medrano pointed out specific areas where LogicLibrary products will strengthen SOA Software offerings. He said the LogicLibrary Logidex product complements its SOA Service Lifecycle Management position with added capabilities including:

• Compliance policy definition and validation
• Mainframe artifact discovery
• Management policy definition and integrated implementation and enforcement
• Depth of support for service definitions
• Enhanced standards support
• Richer RBAC model and IDM system integration
• Federated identity and trust mediation

SOA Software’s Workbench is strengthened with capabilities from LogicLibrary including:

While financial details of the acquisition involving privately held companies was not released, Medrano said it involved a stock transfer. He said Los Angeles-based SOA Software will maintain the LogicLibrary offices including the Pittsburg, PA headquarters, and the Rochester MN research lab. The majority of the staff will also be retained, he added.

Pro wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper immortalized the words “Just when they think they’ve got the answers, I change the questions.”

Now we at SearchSOA.com are asking you to do the same thing, sort of. It won’t involve wearing a kilt or smashing a coconut over anyone’s skull. We just want you to ask some good questions.

We’ve recently revamped our site experts roster and we’re looking to put them through their paces. The way it works is you ask a question and we send the question off to an expert to get you an answer. It’s a fairly illustrious list of folks:

• SOA standards and architecture - Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group
• SOA governance and BPM - Sri Nagabhirava, founder and chief architect nLeague Services
• SOA infrastructure - Dana Gardner, principal analyst Interarbor Solutions
• RIA and enterprise mashups - Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst ZapThink
• SOA testing and QA - Rami Jaamour, product manager of SOA solutions at Parasoft
• Data services - Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research
• SOA development - Chris Haddad, vice president and service director at Burton Group

They’re already producing some top flight insight, like data integration best practices, where grid intersects SOA and the difference between WSDL 1.1 and 2.0. Yet good answers like that depend on good questions from the user community. We sift through heaping piles of “What’s the difference between an application server and a Web server?” (a perfectly legitimate question, but we answered it back in 2003) in order to get some of the top minds in the SOA space the best questions the user base can generate.

The process for submitting a question is simple. Just go to the topic where your question fits and click on “Pose a Question.” That will take you to a question submission form. After that, it’s as simple as typing in your query. Keep us busy. We like it that way.

We at SearchSOA.com have just finished up with the maiden run of our “Pragmatic SOA Governance” seminar. The first two shows were in suburban Philadelphia and Washington D.C. and I’m pleased to report they went swimmingly.

Here’s a few of the high points from the show:

• Anne Thomas Manes, VP and research director at Burton Group, noted that a lot of users want to standardize on a single enterprise service bus, neglecting the reality that most every company will need to support multiple ESBs. She also suggested not thinking of the ESB as a “bus” because it implies that there’s something in the middle of your services. Instead she suggested the term enterprise service network.
• Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO at Software AG, used the image of a crack pipe to illustrate a point during his presentation, namely that bad development habits can be hard to kick.
• Daud Santosa, CTO at the National Business Center inside the U.S. Department of the Interior, made a great point about choosing foundational pieces of technology — if the technology in question requires consistent and costly upkeep, then it shouldn’t be a foundational piece of technology. “This is hard enough,” he said, pointing to the detailed reference architecture he’s trying to implement at NBC. “Look for technology that makes your life easier.”
• Dan Foody, VP of Actional products at Progress Software, made a great observation in response to a question on how can you sell your business on the merits of SOA: take a sales course. His reasoning was you need to describe what service orientation means to your business and outside IT fiefdoms and that will require real professional sales skills.
• Many attendees bemoaned the communications difficulties that plague IT projects, but Matsumura offered that there is a common language everyone speaks: money. The line drew a hearty laugh from the Reston attendees, but later one person from the audience mentioned to me that the “money” line helped crystallize what he needs to do to get executive buy-in.
• John Woolbright, CTO at Synovus Financial Corp., noted that many real-time systems are undone due to a lack of data quality. He suggested defining systems of record for data. “If you want your SOA to be successful you need to know where that data is and how to access it.”
• Foody stressed creating visibility not only into the IT infrastructure, but to the business process itself. Failure to provide that visibility can lead you down the path of applications that don’t deliver as promised for the business, he noted.
• Manes continually stressed the importance of getting a handle on the producer/consumer relationship inside SOA as a key element for governance. Apparently too many users are running into problems caused by unchecked service consumption.

Most of all, a hearty thanks to our attendees. Rarely do you see audiences that are anywhere near that engaged during the presentations. It served as reminder that the practical implementation of SOA governance has become a pressing concern for app dev and IT shops.

I was talking with Wayne Ariola, Parasoft’s vice president of strategy and corporate development, last week about the concept of SOA quality. Parasoft’s been using the term “SOA quality” as part of the latest rollout of its SOAtest product, which now is able to query UDDI registries so that WSDL verification tests can be performed at the time they’re published.

Quality is a key element in software development and it should go without saying that the more business that gets pumped through Web services, the more important it will be to have a good QA process in place for those services. Noting that “lack of central visibility” is normal in the classic software development lifecyle, Ariola listed what he thinks are key elements in that SOA quality process.

1. SOA necessitates centralization, a role played by the registry/repository. He argued that stovepipes become inevitable without it.

2. A health check needs to be performed to make sure the asset meets the requirements. Among the potential requirements, he highlighted defining the asset’s consistency and the boundaries for its reuse.

3. You need a convenient way to emulate the service. Taking down a component could cause unintended chaos once it’s being leveraged in multiple places. Testing and changes are best handled in the virtual arena in order to avoid that trap.

4. If a component or service is going to reused, the testing expectations need to be made readily available so that different orchestration scenarios can be vetted. In general the testing environment should be as open and accessible as possible.
5. Make sure you fully and accurately define your SLAs, future users of that service will need to understand the true behavior expectations behind it.

6. Be prepared to do some sort of compliance monitoring in order to make sure your services are being properly used.

At SearchSOA.com we spend a fair amount of time writing about the importance of governance and how you aren’t likely to succeed with service orientation unless you put a solid governance model around those efforts.

Yet let’s be honest, the term “SOA governance” sucks. It reeks of someone else telling you what to do, hectoring you over every little detail of a project. It sounds about as desirable as a colonoscopy with an IMAX camera.

It’s a particularly sticky term here in the U.S.A. We don’t like a lot of governance. In fact, we get uppity when we think we’ve been placed under the yoke of too much governance. We’ll dump your tea in the harbor when that happens. In fact, you can be sure many project teams have formed some unprintable thoughts about governance without representation.

That said, can we admit that stovepipe application development leads to needless duplication of effort and that it actually prevents businesses from pursuing new opportunities? Being a cowboy sure sounds like fun, but if that’s what you want, then go buy a horse. If you want to work for a company with stockholders/investors and a comprehensive benefits package, then maybe, just maybe, you might want to consider how what you do affects the bottom line.

At the end of the day, that’s the crux of SOA governance – let’s put a little organization around all these disjointed IT efforts in order to make them more profitable. I suspect everyone whose hackles rise at the sound of the word “governance” would agree with that statement. No one wants to be the square peg begging for a hammering. Beyond that, who doesn’t want their work to be considered valuable?

The rub comes in how to sum up all of the things that exist under the heading of SOA governance in a term that doesn’t cause automatic resentment. As ZapThink’s David Linthicum noted recently, SOA governance encompasses a lot of import facets in application development and management. We need to call it something. I’ve heard “productivity” and “business value” tossed around as replacement terms, but those still sound a bit too buzzwordy.

As a believer in the wisdom of humans, though, I figure someone out there has come up with a term preferable to SOA governance. Feel free to inundate us with suggestions. We’ll pool them together and then put together a poll to see which one our readers prefer. Who knows, maybe we’ll come up with something that sounds more like something you want to do and less like something someone else is forcing you to do (or trying to sell you).

SearchSOA.com has gone international. Just recently we launched a version of the site in China. Now, technically speaking, we don’t have a billion new readers on the site, but you get the idea: namely, we’ve launched the site in the most populous nation on the planet.

Apparently a lot of those emerging businesses in China are thinking it might make sense not to build a haphazard and unmanageable application infrastructure. Imagine that? These companies might actually start with a well-conceived reference architecture and adhere to the basic principles of service orientation. They might be employing the best practices covered in our Service Orientation for Architects School inside those pristine greenfields with which they get to work.

It’s actually not the most comforting notion when you get right down to it. You’ve got who knows how many emerging companies looking to run IT as a profit center instead of a cost center. What if they’re agile and you’re not? How many partnerships will you miss out on? How much business will go to someone else? Suddenly the world isn’t as flat as Thomas Friedman theorized. Instead you’re surrounded by mountains to climb in every direction.

It should be fascinating to see how SOA adoption goes in China. Will the Ertan Hydropower’s Yalong River Dam project be the standard over there? If so, then app dev really will have entered a new world order.

Of course, maybe we’ll confuse our Mandarin readers as much as we help them. For instance, when our lead writer Rich Seeley makes a reference to Yogi Berra at the top of a story, it could cause people to think Yogi Berra is some famous IT guru whose wisdom must be sought out … and that could be a big clog in their machine.

Last week we got flooded with requests to extend the deadline for our Products of the Year Awards submissions. Normally we’d have taken a “no soup for you” stance on this, but when the requests topped the dozen mark we figured we should grant an extension.

Now you’ve got until February 15 to fill out the nomination form. It will push back the announcement of winners until March, but we believe this will be the most comprehensive set of awards handed out in the SOA space and we wanted to make sure absolutely everyone gets a chance to submit.

For those of you who don’t know, we have eight categories:

1. Service design and modeling (including BPM)
2. Service assembly and integration (ESB, orchestration)
3. Service performance (testing, QA)
4. SOA runtime management
5. Data services/integration (including BI)
6. SOA security
7. SOA governance (including registry/repository)
8. Composite application assembly (portal, Ajax, RIA)

Products need to have been released between Dec. 1, 2006 and Nov. 30, 2007. You can check the nomination form for more details, though we highly recommend you explain how the product enables SOA and adheres to the principles of service orientation in your entry.

For the past two years, we at SearchSOA.com have been told regularly by our members (numbering 450,000+ these days), that you need help with governance. Apparently the mechanics of running an SOA is one of the biggest challenges users face.

That’s no surprise, the reuse, performance, management and ownership aspects of SOA are, literally, a sea change for a lot of IT organizations. This is business as unusual.

With that in mind, we’ve put together our Pragmatic SOA Governance Seminar, a free one-day event which covers the design time, runtime and business aspects of SOA governance. The material is geared toward key decisions makers in your IT organization - CTOs, enterprise architects and app dev managers. The seminar will go beyond theory and focus on actionable steps you can take to achieve SOA governance right now.

The dates and locations of the seminars are:

• February 21, San Jose, CA
• February 26, Reston, VA
• February 28, Mt. Laurel, NJ

Those interested in attending need to submit a registration form or call Lauren Nickerson at 781-657-1782.

One of the leading lights in the SOA community, Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, will be presenting the main sessions. In addition there will be a user case study presented in each of the three cities: Transunion in San Jose, the Department of the Interior in Reston and Synovus Financial in Mt. Laurel. Each of these users has gone through the hard work of implementing an enterprise-wide SOA and will share their hands-on experiences about best and worst practices when it comes to SOA governance.

We’ve taken pains to make sure this seminar won’t be the standard boilerplate presentation of SOA governance with some vendors then saying all you need to do is buy Product X and your governance needs will be solved. These events will identify specific governance pain points and offer up sensible solutions. At SearchSOA.com we hold ourselves to a high standard. Just as we take pains to give you independent, in-depth of SOA-related news (instead of repackaged press releases), we’ve made sure that you can walk away from this seminar with a laundry list of SOA governance action items.