SOA management, SOA governance -- keep them separated

What's the difference between "SOA governance" and "SOA management?" Aren't they essentially the same thing? Not so, says Eric Roch, who claims some analysts wrongly are lumping the two into a single solution category.

Governance is about the business, management is about technical monitoring

As a shining example of the confusion between the two categories, Eric dissected Forrester's "Wave" analysis versus Gartner's "Magic Quandrant" in regards to positioning of SOA management solutions, and comes down in favor of Forrester.

As Eric explains it, Forrester's Wave for Standalone SOA and Web Services Management Solutions, Q4 2007 "has SOA management as a distinct product category with Progress’ Actional and Amberpoint listed as leaders." Gartner, on the other hand, included larger catch-all lifecycle suites from IBM and HP with in its Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets, 2007 report.

Essentially, Gartner "diluted" the service management category with lifecycle governance solutions, Eric says. SOA service management needs to remain in its own category, and Eric explains the reasons why:

"Forrester has it right in my opinion in that SOA management should be a distinct product category. You would not lump your application server monitoring tools in with your software change management tools even though both are needed to make sure your Web applications are governed. You should have a separate set of requirements for the registry/repository and for SOA management."

Eric says the two types of products should be integrated so they work well together. But he also hit supon an interesting point here as well. SOA governance tools are more about the business; they help manage how the business proliferates, recognizes and consumes SOA services. SOA management tools are for the IT department, they help ensure service uptime, security, and availability through monitoring and SLAs.