SOA Software announced today the launch of what they call the industry's first SOA Planning Governance product. SOA Software's Portfolio Manager ensures the alignment of strategic investment in SOA and business objectives by helping enterprises build the right services at the right time.
Planning Governance helps enterprises maximize their investment in SOA on platforms like IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, RedHat and others by making sure they build services to plan and to priority. Through planning governance, IT organizations can better understand dependencies between planned services and prioritize development appropriately, and can build services based on current and planned needs.

SOA programs require strong planning processes to build enterprise services that are generally reusable. Project-specific services will not be flexible enough to support generalized reuse, and without early success, application development teams will not see the potential value of SOA. In short, SOA portfolio management helps organizations evolve as needed to support successful SOA programs.
Portfolio Manager is an SOA portfolio management product that reportedly helps customers better align IT investments with business initiatives and become more adaptable to their changing requirements. Portfolio Manager reportedly identifies candidate services and builds an SOA roadmap through SOA Modeling (i.e. top-down analysis), Asset Identification (i.e., bottom-up application inventory), and SOA Roadmap Management (i.e., service identification, prioritization and allocation) processes. To achieve these goals Portfolio Manager functions as part of SOA Software's unified SOA Governance automation suite.

Portfolio Manager:

• Identifies candidate services from existing assets and target architectures
• Delivers packaged SOA planning governance methods and governance automation meta-models
• Represents current and future architecture models based on industry standards and internal definitions
• Delivers preloaded APQC business process frameworks promoting compliance with industry best practices
• Imports existing assets and services from asset management systems and UDDI registries
• Automatically provisions prioritized services into Repository Manager for Development Governance Automation
• Ensures that SOA Governance is a continuous dynamic process to maximize the value of, and protect the investment in portfolio management.

Portfolio Manager is available as of January 2009, pricing starts at $50k.