With all these application services sitting around on the network, SOA management will continue to be an important part of your SOA strategy, especially in 2006 as you begin to seriously construct your enterprise SOA. Both operational and functional management will need attention in 2006, internally as well as externally with partners and customers. The past two years have seen a great deal of consolidation in the SOA management area with the Actional-Westbridge merger, Oracle's purchase of Oblix (Confluent) and IBM's acquisition of DataPower, but there's still plenty of product to go around.
Operational (invocation counts, response times) and functional (routing, transformation, transactional logging) management lines are still blurred, with CA and Hewlett-Packard standing on the operational-only side of the road while Actional, Reactivity and SOA Software hang out on the functional side. AmberPoint and DataPower drive down the middle, supporting WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) for operational management and WS-Policy for functional management.
You'll need to manage both in the coming year, so start to consider whether a single solution can fill your needs for both functional and operational management, or if you'll need to buy point products to get the job done.
Application Infrastructure
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Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
