Having problems with message search?
<<In "The
Registry and SOA Governance Market Landscape," the second of two reports
published in the past two weeks, Anne Thomas Manes, research director at Burton
Group Inc., noted that the once placid world of registry/repository exploded in
the past year. In a feeding frenzy Mercury Interactive Inc. acquired Systinet
Inc., only to then be acquired by Hewlett-Packard Corp., which overnight became
king of the hill for registry/repository technology. Then in a smaller, but not
insignificant deal, webMethods Inc. acquired Infravio Inc. for its registry/repository
product. So where does the market stand now? And when should organizations look
for the registry/repository component of their SOA infrastructure? Manes
answers those and other questions in this interview.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What does the registry/repository vendor landscape look like now?
Anne Thomas Manes: It's been kind of a volatile place over the last year. It
started out with Mercury acquiring Systinet, the leading registry player. That
was shortly after Systinet released its first registry/repository product,
which was a significantly different product from just the registry they had
before. Then HP acquired Mercury. Meanwhile, webMethods acquired Infravio. And
then IBM comes out with their registry/repository. Software AG came out with
CenterSite. BEA had already licensed Systinet's registry as a reseller. Then
Oracle also licensed Systinet and so did Tibco. In fact, Tibco sells this
product called Matrix, which is the Systinet registry plus the AmberPoint Web
services management product. Progress also partners with Systinet and HP.
So a lot of vendors are
beholding to HP for their registry/repository technology?
Manes: They certainly are, but that's an indication of the fact that so many of
the platform vendors have decided that they have to have a registry as part of
their solution. And that's an indication that the customers are demanding it.
Why didn't more of the
vendors develop their own registry technology?
Manes: Actually, every single one of these platform vendors had a registry back
in 2002. But most of the vendors jettisoned them, threw them away, because what
they had was garbage. They were worthless. They were just raw implementations
of UDDI and that doesn't give you the governance that you really need. So basically
after 2002, Systinet had the entire market to themselves. Then Infravio comes
into the market in 2004. For the longest time it was Systinet and Infravio.
Infravio had six or seven customers, and Systinet had around 250. So Systinet
was the market with Infravio as this little mosquito over on the side.
A mosquito with
Manes: Once Miko joined Infravio, it became more than just a little mosquito.
It became a dragonfly. He's done a huge amount to increase awareness of
Infravio. It's been a good thing for Infravio.
Is there anything available
in open source in the registry/repository area?
Manes: I don't know of any repository out there. There is one breathing open
source project out there, which is called jUDDI, which is an Apache project.
It's implemented in Java, but it's not just for Java. The UDDI registry is a
service. It runs as a standalone and exposes protocols for other things to
communicate with it. So jUDDI is a bare bones implementation of UDDI. That's
equivalent to what all the platform vendors had in 2002 that nobody was
interested in using because that's really not a valuable thing. You need a lot
more for a registry than just a bare bones implementation of the UDDI protocol.
And the jUDDI implementation is implementing UDDI version 2. There's so much
more to UDDI version 3, which is really designed to support the requirements of
an enterprise registry. So jUDDI is, as I said, breathing. There was another
open source initiative that Novell initiated that was built on a directory as
opposed to a database, which was a big mistake. Novell didn't understand that
registries are not the same as directories. That implementation has definitely
died. The jUDDI project has had one or two people who periodically do some work
on it, but there's no active community supporting it. There is one guy who says
he's going to rejuvenate it. He says he's going to upgrade it to UDDI version
3. We'll see.
Is implementing UDDI
version 3 the key?
Manes: A bare bones implantation of UDDI version 3 is still not the same as the
Systinet registry. I'm not talking about the repository. I'm talking about the
Systinet registry. That's the premium registry in the market, which is now
being distributed by HP, Oracle, BEA and Tibco. And it does much more than just
be a bare bones implementation of UDDI. It has substantial governance
capabilities. It has ways of managing staging of services from development to
test to production. It's got a whole bunch of management stuff built into it,
which is really important. A registry is the management component of your
infrastructure. It's also got a whole bunch of data model representations that
enable it to communicate with AmberPoint, Actional, SOA Software, Infravio,
Reactivity, Layer 7, DataPower, the BEA ESB, Oracle's ESB, the Sonic ESB and
other systems. That's because Systinet went off and created this thing they
call the governance interoperability framework. That's actually built into the
registry and all these other systems know how to communicate management information
using this framework. That's what differentiates the Systinet registry from all
other registries.
So does that leave
webMethods with Infravio as a distant second?
Manes: It's not even on the roadmap. webMethods is going to be reasonably
successful selling the Infravio registry to its customer base. My guess is they
are not going to be very successful selling it to someone who is not a current
webMethods customer. They may. I think they are trying to use Infravio as a
means of expanding their customer base, but I don't have a great deal of
confidence that they'll be successful. And what I'm really afraid of is they're
going to turn this into a platform play. They're going to integrate it into
(webMethods) Fabric to try to convince more people to buy Fabric. And once it
becomes a platform play, it's not very interesting anymore.
Would you see that leading
to vendor lock-in?
Manes: Exactly.
So how does this all shake
out?
Manes: HP is king of the hill right now. Then there's IBM, which has this
non-standard WebSphere Registry and Repository based on their own API, but IBM
has enough power in the industry to actually muscle people into adopting their
proprietary solution.
Are we leaving any vendors
out?
Manes: SOA Software also has a registry/repository. They've produced a new
product called Workbench. That's a UDDI 3.0-based registry and repository. I
haven't looked into their implementation, so I'm not really sure what its core
capabilities are, but it does have governance capabilities above and beyond
just the registry.
Looking forward this year,
is there anything we should look for in the vendor landscape?
Manes: Microsoft doesn't really have a registry today. Well, actually they do.
They provide one free of charge as part of the Windows server, but it's what
gave UDDI a bad name. It's a bare bones implementation of UDDI version 2 and
nobody in their right mind should ever consider using it as a real registry. To
date, Microsoft hasn't been unwilling to give me any information about future
plans they might have in terms of registry/repository components, but my guess
is at some point they're going to do something.
Then SAP hasn't really come out with a
cohesive registry/repository. Actually, let me say this, they've got way too
many registry/repositories, but they haven't come out with a good,
understandable strategy regarding SOA governance. They do have a
governance/risk management solution. They call it GRC, governance, risk
management, compliance. But that's not SOA governance.
So we still don't know what SAP is going to
do. And we still don't know what Microsoft's going to do.>>
You can read this at:
Gervas
Offline 
Send Email