SOA Software, an SOA governance vendor, has launched a tool designed to ensure the alignment of strategic investment in SOA and business objectives by helping enterprises build the right services at the right time. Portfolio Manager, an SOA planning governance product, helps customers identify candidate services and build an SOA roadmap through SOA modeling (i.e., top-down analysis), asset identification (i.e., bottom-up application inventory), and SOA roadmap management (i.e., service identification, prioritization and allocation) processes.
"Portfolio Manager extends application portfolio management processes into the realm of SOA to make sure that the services that you are building and exposing as an organization are aligned with your strategic investment in IT," Ian Goldsmith, vice president of product management, SOA Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
With planning and prioritization of services more important than ever, Portfolio Manager is intended to help customers better align IT investments with business initiatives and become more adaptable to their changing requirements. Portfolio Manager functions as part of the vendor's unified SOA Governance automation suite.
Brent Carlson, senior vice president of technology at SOA Software, notes that the company expects the product to be used by large enterprises, the same sorts of companies that are buying the current set of SOA Software products. These are customers who perhaps have multiple business units or who have gone through mergers and acquisitions are doing SOA to try to rationalize their existing application, align and modernize it, and expose it out, he notes. Customers may also have a variety of upstream and downstream business partners and intend to leverage web services and SOA-based techniques for communicating with those upstream and downstream business partners as well.
"Most organizations entering SOA struggle with getting service planning right," observes Carlson. "If you have scarce IT funding resources, you want to make sure that you apply those resources to the best possible activities within the organization. You can't afford to let individual project teams build what they think is the right thing for them." Instead, he says, "You need somebody with enough oversight and enough visibility to look at the macro view, to make the broader decisions about: how do we support the business as whole, and meet our business objectives as whole, and where can we get the most bang for the buck." For more information, go here.