09/11/2007

SOA Software, a provider of comprehensive Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services governance, security, mediation and management solutions, today announced that it has extended its Workbench product with a comprehensive governance solution for Microsoft BizTalk Server.

ebizQ received the following:

Working closely with Microsoft Corp. to deliver a closed-loop governance solution for BizTalk Server 2006 R2, SOA Software allows customers to confidently use BizTalk Server to automate mission critical business process, ensuring that the resulting applications are secure, reliable, and comply with enterprise and regulatory policies. By leveraging SOA Software’s Workbench in conjunction with BizTalk Server 2006 R2, customers can consistently govern, secure, mediate and manage the policy and lifecycle of any type of SOA service deployed and accessed on any transport.

BizTalk Server is quickly becoming one of the most important service platforms for enterprise business process management and automation. Companies deploying BizTalk Server have to ensure that it fits into their overarching enterprise SOA governance strategy as a governed service platform. SOA Software’s Workbench is deeply integrated with Microsoft’s ESB Guidance Toolkit and offers essential governance capabilities for BizTalk Server:

• Closed-loop Governance – define, manage, and govern policies through a central registry/repository, enforce them through distributed service platforms such as BizTalk Server, and audit that the policies are being enforced.



• Uniform Policy Management – Workbench ensures that service consumed and provided by BizTalk Server enforce, implement, and comply with a common set of centrally defined and governed policies.



• Heterogeneous Governance Automation – Workbench provides comprehensive lifecycle management, policy management, and consumer management workflow capabilities to automate the governance processes for services exposed and consumed by BizTalk Server and any other enterprise service platform.



• Dynamic Policy Enforcement and Implementation – BizTalk Server, through Microsoft ESB Guidance, leverages Workbench’s WS-MEX interfaces enabling dynamic policy discovery and implementation, as well as dynamic binding and end-point resolution



• Trust Mediation and Bridging – Workbench ensures seamless interoperability between the various security mechanisms used by the different platforms throughout the enterprise. It allows users to leverage desktop authentication mechanisms like Kerberos and smartcards, providing a mediation solution that ensures end-to-end single-sign-on with backend services provided by a wide range of enterprise platforms.

Workbench provides an integrated Service Management, Registry/Repository and Policy management solution, allowing Microsoft to respond to a customer’s end-to-end SOA Governance requirements. By integrating with BizTalk Server as a pipeline, it provides full service lifecycle management along with features such as design-time compliance testing, service discovery via a UDDI v2/v3 interface, service provisioning, WS-S security and service monitoring regardless of protocol.

Features include:

• “Last Mile” Policy Enforcement for security, monitoring, mediation, and management



• Authentication, authorization, encryption/decryption, signature



• Usage, performance, message data collection



• Syntactic, standards, and message exchange pattern mediation for interoperability



• Web Service Monitoring and QOS alerting



• SLA Management



• Web Services Service Auto-Discovery and Auto-Management

“The combination of SOA Software’s SOA Governance solution and Microsoft’s BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides customers with an enterprise-class solution for SOA Governance, security, mediation, and management,” said Steven Martin, Director of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. “SOA Software’s integration with BizTalk Server drives additional security, reliability, and performance of the services consumed and exposed by BizTalk Server.”

“We see the rapid adoption of BizTalk Server for enterprise business process automation as an indicator of the coming of age of SOA,” said Frank Martinez, SOA Software executive vice president of product strategy. “Our strategic relationship with Microsoft has allowed us to deliver a solution that gives enterprise customers the ability to confidently deploy BizTalk Server as a governed service platform, ensuring the security, reliability, and policy compliance of their applications.”