Now, SOA governance goes open source

MuleSource recently announced the general availability of Mule Galaxy Enterprise, the first open source SOA governance platform with integrated registry and repository.

Add registry and repository to the growing list of open-source SOA tools

This is significant, because it represents the beginning of the next wave of open-source SOA tools and platforms, joining application servers, Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) and development toolsets.

These offerings cater to the unserved and underserved markets that would never be enough of a market for large commercial vendors chasing well-heeled corporations that could afford SOA.

As reported in my last post, AMR estimates the average company adopting SOA spent nearly $1.4 million on SOA efforts in 2007, with close to half spending over $500,000 on SOA software and services. These numbers are clearly way over the top for small to medium-size businesses that need to squeeze everything they can get out of their IT dollars.

As Harvard's Clayton Christensen points out, companies serving underserved low-margin markets will tend to keep expanding upward, constantly chasing vendors catering to high-margin opportunities upstream. This is happening in the SOA space right now.

We're being told the market will soon be spending more than $50 billion on SOA solutions, but at the same time, nobody knows if SOA has been that much of a success yet. (Only about one out of five are showing positive returns, says Burton Group.)

Having more open-source SOA solutions may be good news for big organizations as well. We already know that companies are skittish about falling into big budget-busting attempts at new approaches to enterprise architecture. More affordable SOA has a far greater tolerance to experimentation and failure.