BEA unveils SOA governance tool

By Tom Sanders

Sep 20 2006 9:49AM

Workspace 360 to track development progress and measure return on investment.

BEA is scheduled to unveil a new governance tool that will allow developers and managers to track the development and effectiveness of services in a service oriented architecture (SOA).

The company plans to launch the new product today at the BEA World conference in San Francisco.

BEA Workspace 360 will ship with several pre-configured roles for specific groups of end users such as business analysts, developers, IT operations and application architects, exposing each group to the data that they require.

The tool will allow the business analyst to define the application's requirements and functionalities.

The application architect then determines the application's overall architectural structure, matching those with the services that are already available and defining which new services need to be developed.

That information is automatically passed on to the developer, and also allows the system to determine the hardware requirements and server loads.

"Every step that goes in, you add one more layer of information," BEA's chief technology officer Rob Levy explained in an interview with vnunet.com.

"In order to truly do governance of the project from the beginning to the end, the only way is having complete control of the cycle and putting all the information into the enterprise repository."

Workspace 360 pulls data from the middleware applications that make up the SOA platform. Due to a lack of industry standards, the application will only work with BEA's Aqualogic, Tuxedo and Weblogic products.

Components of the forthcoming Workspace 360 are available today, and the final product is scheduled for release in 2007.