Software AG is the supplier of the Natural language, Adabase database system, and integration middleware. It's now betting its $546 million acquisition of WebMethods last April is going to pay off in SOA management.

It's capitalizing on the Web services registry and repository that were included with the purchase, thanks to WebMethods ownership of Infravio's registry/repository from its purchase of the startup in 2006. The registry/repository stores services, manages versions of services, and applies automated policies to them. That allows a few administrators to track, maintain, revise, and, if necessary, kill off burgeoning services as circumstances dictate.

CentraSite Governance Edition "gives Software AG a viable competitor to best-of-breed SOA governance solutions," wrote Brad Shimmin, analyst at Current Analysis, in a report on the introduction. Among the competitors would be Hewlett-Packard, which acquired Systinet as the core of its SOA governance product, as well as startups SOA Software and AmberPoint.

Peter Kurpick, Software AG's chief product officer of the WebMethods product line and member of the executive board, said in an interview that the CentraSite user interface allows IT managers to design services and set policies that reflect service level agreements.

Services typically evolve through several versions, and Governance Edition allows managers to chose a governance model, then automatically apply policies that determine how changes to them will be captured and recorded. "Predefined best practices are embedded in this system. They can be implemented as executable policies," said Kurpick. The 80 best practices included cover such things as Web Services Description Language validation, implementing service level agreements, and logging events and monitoring alerts.

Governance Edition includes an ability to apply impact analysis to changes made to services, with an ability to navigate through "chains of relationships and interdependencies. The application allows a manager to pose "what if" scenarios to determine the impact of changes.

Software AG previously launched a version of CentraSite called Enterprise Edition, which it developed jointly with Fujitsu. The product complements Governance Edition and collects data on services, their underlying software assets, and how they were developed, said Kurpick. Shimmin predicted the two will be made interoperative in early 2008.

Shimmin also pointed out "the company must maintain two distinctive code trees for these products" for the time being because they were not developed jointly from scratch. Until it is able to merge the two into a shared code base, it "will not be able to quickly innovate across both product lines."

Kurpick said Software AG "has begun to converge the two products" and will continue with that work as quickly as possible.