SOA Software Inc., today announced support for the Service Infrastructure product strategy introduced by BEA Systems. Developed to help increase business agility while reducing IT cost and complexity, BEA's Service Infrastructure product family is designed to help manage the service-oriented architecture (SOA) lifecycle in heterogeneous environments while making the transition from pilot to enterprise-wide production easier to implement. SOA Software Inc.'s leading solution is designed to enhance the enterprise-class Web services management capabilities of BEA's Service Infrastructure product family.

SOA Software Inc.'s award-winning Service Manage is designed to provide BEA customers with comprehensive Web services management across their SOA environment. Service Manager is designed to help to provide in-depth SLA management capabilities enabled by a customizable dashboard for performance monitoring and auditing of transactions, events, warnings and alerts. This product is designed to enhance the value of the BEA Service Infrastructure products to heterogeneous environments both within the enterprise and between business partners.

SOA is a software design approach that takes the discrete business functions contained in enterprise applications and organizes them into interoperable, standards-based services. These services are designed to be combined and reused in composite applications and processes to meet business needs. Service infrastructure is a new category of enterprise software designed to help enable the successful deployment of SOA in business environments by allowing services to be discovered, secured, managed and assembled into composite applications and processes - regardless of the underlying technology.

"Our alliance with SOA Software is part of BEA's initiative designed to continually help customers manage SOA based environments and improve business agility and efficiency," said Gail Ennis, vice president of Worldwide Alliances. "As a leading provider of Web services management solutions, SOA Software can add considerable value to customers implementing BEA Service Infrastructure products."

Service Infrastructure Helps Move SOA from Pilot to Production Customers gravitate to SOA's modularity and flexibility, which is designed to help them to mix and match IT resources in a "virtual" infrastructure that is integrated while not being locked into a single vendor's IT stack. SOA also reflects a move from thinking about IT in an "application" context to thinking about IT as a "services" delivery business - helping to enable IT departments to create, assemble and deliver new services more quickly for use by employees, customers, partners and suppliers. As a new approach to enterprise IT implementation and application development, SOA can break down business applications and features into "services" - specific pieces of functionality - which can be efficiently built, combined, adapted and reused.

Most customers to date are using their application infrastructure software (application servers, integration servers, development tools and portal software) to build and deploy their early SOA projects. As SOA moves from pilot to production, companies have found that they need new infrastructure that is designed to help them to quickly compose, deliver, configure and manage these services.

Customers typically encounter this once they have built and deployed more than 50 services, which can result in a "services sprawl" that requires constant integration and can be difficult to scale. They also need new composition tools that work like an "assembly line" for building cars, in addition to traditional coding tools they used for "building car parts." Service infrastructure is a new category of enterprise software designed to help enable businesses compose, configure and reuse technology assets to meet business needs in a more assembly line model.