Mergere: Broad Manageabilty's SOA Benefits - First Look

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October 12, 2006
Mergere: Broad Manageabilty's SOA Benefits

Here's some news for companies building an SOA – there’s a new approach to coordinating business and IT groups and ensuring a higher level of quality, change, and build management to deliver services.

Dave Schwartz of Mergere Dave Schwartz, General Manager of Mergere, joined us to explain. His company’s new 1.1 version of its Maestro product allows enterprises to keep a well-organized repository of what services they are using and a transparent view into how they are being used.

“The service-based IT infrastructure and good build tools are driven by three key concepts,” Schwartz said. They are, in his words:

1. Broad manageability of interdependent components across an asynchronous, heterogenous environment.

2. Good separation of concerns by using modularity and granularity in the development process.

3. Standardization of interfaces and dependencies.

Of the three, “broad manageability is definitely the key thing that everyone’s focused on right now,” Schwartz said. “And that begins with the active use of an articfact repository that contains artifacts you’re going to need during build time and run time and also metadata about these types of information.

“Organizations that maintain this information early in the development process are guaranteed that they’re going to be able to have manageability once they deploy the service in the long run,” Schwartz said. “This type of information can automate the actual building of the service and make development of services much simpler for SOA developers.”

On reuse, “you need to know a component exists and you also need to know how to get that component,” Schwartz said. Having an artifact repository available and being able to do continuous integration testing against these types of systems ensures you can have reuse within your organization.

If you don’t have ability to test the service by deploying the service automatically in an integration-type environment, you’re not going to know if your interfaces are clean and will build the way you’re going to need them to at run time," he added.

Schwartz concluded by explaining how Maestro tracks actual cross-dependencies between the different applications in metadata. “When you know this from the beginning there’s no additional info you’re going to need to acquire to provide the governance,” he noted. “You can use our repository to see all the different applications that are making use of our service and let people proactively know about the changes.”