At present, partnerships or single-vendor suites are also how run-time management is integrated with design-time governance. The furthest along of the specialist vendors here is SOA Software, which launched its own governance product in December. Similarly, Oracle and IBM include some management capabilities in their SOA suites, while HP last year acquired management vendor Mercury Interactive and its Systinet governance product.
The best hope for standardization looks like WS-Policy, a standard for describing the policies of a Web service. But this doesn't go far enough, so several vendors are working on SOA Link, a set of interoperability links that aims to unite management and governance. Founded by governance vendor Infravio, this initiative includes most of the pure-play SOA industry. However, heavyweights IBM, Microsoft and Sun seem unlikely to participate, as Infravio is now part of competitor Software AG.
Security Gateways
Security gateways started out as XML firewalls, and this remains their core function. Because Web services go straight through Port 80, a SOA exposed to the Internet needs a firewall that can inspect traffic content; this involves much of the same security functionality as is found in SOA management software. A gateway's content-aware processing also can be used for routing and ID management, lightening XML's load on a management or ESB server. In these cases, the same or similar appliances might be placed deep within a SOA rather than at the edge.
The conflict between network infrastructure and software vendors is clearest in the security gateway space. Although usually sold as hardware boxes, some are fundamentally software running on a blade server platform. Others use dedicated hardware that is already extended to other SOA functionality.
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