TIBCO Software announced the availability of a comprehensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance solution comprised of TIBCO ActiveMatrix Registry and TIBCO ActiveMatrix Policy Manager. The new governance products are designed to reduce risk and complexity around the common challenges associated with adopting SOA including defining appropriate services, managing the lifecycle of service assets, and measuring effectiveness.

SOA encourages the common and distributed use of services across siloed lines of business. The nature of these business services and the potential composition of them across organizational boundaries is driving the need for governance throughout the entire SOA life cycle. For example, as organizations create, orchestrate and deploy enterprise services, compliance to requirements dictated by factors such as security, reliability, and performance need to be overseen by a complete governance solution that can set policies, measurements and control mechanisms.

"The reality is that companies transitioning to an SOA need to start thinking about IT governance more seriously. It will help to establish chains of responsibility, authority and communication between lines of business, eliminating confusion and uncertainty," said Matt Quinn, vice president, Product Management and Strategy, TIBCO. "Setting policies, measurements and control mechanisms will enable employees to carry out their roles and responsibilities more effectively and make better, faster decisions. It will also help to ensure the long-term business value of your services."

SOA governance has two essential components -- design time and run time. The first is powered by TIBCO ActiveMatrix Registry, which provides a simple and standards-based means for publishing and discovering SOA artifacts. The second component is powered by TIBCO ActiveMatrix Policy Manager and is responsible for managing and enforcing policy across a heterogeneous SOA.

In SOA, there is an end-to-end reuse requirement for a service registry and repository. TIBCO ActiveMatrix Registry provides a simple means for publishing and discovering SOA artifacts, such as services and policies. TIBCO ActiveMatrix Registry captures all the functional and non-functional service descriptions into a centrally managed, reliable, searchable repository. Fully standards-compliant, TIBCO ActiveMatrix Registry provides a highly scalable index of services and metadata that exposes a subset of SOA information for other tools and technologies to discover in operation. Once a service is delivered, the operational management of that service, including potential changes, can be tracked and controlled by the registry.

TIBCO ActiveMatrix Policy Manager provides the ability to manage and enforce policy across a heterogeneous SOA. The product, developed in collaboration with AmberPoint, Inc., helps meet compliance challenges, improves agility, and simplifies SOA development. TIBCO ActiveMatrix Policy Manager allows companies to manage authentication and authorization, encryption, logging, auditing and service versioning in a centralized and configuration-driven approach rather than it being hard-coded into all the services.