There are many robust IT management and monitoring tools on the market, but Forrester’s Randy Heffner advises to keep looking at specialized SOA management platforms to track and enable service requests and responses, as well as ensure effective policy management across those services.
To this end, Heffner just published a report on the state of the SOA standalone management solutions market, which looks at the capabilities of various solutions, and the vendors with the most to offer in this space.
Such software is designed to employ agents or intermediaries to observe flows of SOA requests and responses through an IT infrastructure and determine the performance and availability of SOA services, Heffner explains. “Although one could achieve a certain level of SOA environment management using general IT management tools,” he adds, “SOA management solutions provide their greatest value by supplying deep monitoring and visibility…. [and] enhancing policy-based control of your SOA services.”
Based on Forrester’s ratings, the vendor coming out on top is Progress Software, with strong offerings also available from IBM, SOA Software, WSO2, and Managed Methods. As Heffner describes in the evaluation report, “Progress Actional has visibility into the broadest range of SOA infrastructure, and its agents have among the deepest capabilities to correlate service requests and responses as they flow through Java and .NET runtimes.”
Progress’s offerings received a weighted rating of 4.33 on a scale of 1 to 5, including factors such as monitoring and management reach and richness, performance and availability management, business transaction management, trust enablement, policy management, and product architecture. SOA Software was the runner-up with a rating of 3.53 for its product set.
Progress also topped the list in terms of strategy (4.65), while IBM took the lead in market presence (4.39).
Oracle, HP and CA Technologies were not included in Forrester’s evaluation, as their SOA management capabilities are subsumed into broader product sets, versus being standalone.
