webMethods, Inc. (Nasdaq:WEBM), a leading business integration and optimization software company and a charter sponsor of SOAWorld 2007 East Conference & Expo, and iTKO, Inc., a provider of complete testing solutions for SOA software, today announced a global alliance to more broadly address testing and governance requirements spanning the service-oriented architecture (SOA) lifecycle.

The webMethods Infravio X-Registry and the iTKO LISA 3.5 SOA Testing Framework respectively address the need for lifecycle governance and testing within an SOA. Building upon this foundation, the two companies are working collaboratively to produce a joint solution that will allow enterprises to more easily scale their SOA implementations. More specifically, the initiative is designed to improve the long-term manageability of each implementation while reducing its ongoing maintenance costs. iTKO and webMethods will also engage in joint sales and marketing activities in support of the partnership.

“SOA provides agility through rapid configuration of contract and business process metadata,” said Miko Matsumura, vice president, webMethods, Inc. “However, without change time governance and continuous quality assurance, these rapid changes can result in cascading breakdowns in security, performance, lifecycle processes and the relationships between service providers and consumers.”

According to Gartner, Inc., “Testing and validating policies and processes is critical because they often may conflict; and because of the SOA's loose coupling nature, it will be necessary to dynamically validate configurations or dependencies during deployment cycles. Testing and validation methodologies and solutions are increasingly dependent on policy management and enforcement tools, because these tools deliver valuable SOA usage and scenario data. This data can be used to create test environments based on real-world scenarios. Thus, assets can be thoroughly tested for faults, availability, performance, scalability and security.”¹

In a recent survey², the research firm found that business innovation and agility for responding to specific business problems were the two most cited reasons for adopting SOA strategies.

However, this desire to more readily reconfigure enterprise systems and business processes using SOA also increases the complexity and brittleness of the underlying implementation. This is due to the often rapid pace of these changes, the broad range of impacted users, and the diversity of use cases that each service needs to support.

As a result, a lifecycle governance system is often needed to automate and validate the change management and impact analysis processes. This reduces the time and effort required to track and coordinate approvals, certifications, impacted parties, cascading dependencies, versioning and other dynamic variables. Coupling this approach with an integrated service quality system for continuous monitoring and resolution enables higher satisfaction levels for service consumers as it ensures high levels of stability, reliability and quality despite the highly dynamic nature of these demands.

“SOA testing isn’t a passive activity. Rather, it’s an active and continuing process for enabling enterprise-level performance,” said Jim Mackay, CMO, iTKO, Inc. “By partnering with webMethods, we can help joint customers dramatically improve the performance and reliability of their implementations. At the same time, organizations can also reduce the cost of these efforts through the use of automated testing as a complementary component of their governance strategy.”

The webMethods Infravio X-Registry offers users a role-based workspace for tracking, managing and automating the policies and processes used to govern disparate services throughout their lifecycle and across multiple user groups. It includes an integrated registry/repository that is both UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration protocol) v. 3.0, and JAXR (Java API for XML Registries) compliant, as well as additional lifecycle governance features. This ensures that specific policies can be readily applied across design-time, run-time and change-time environments.

The iTKO LISA 3.5 SOA Testing Framework delivers a comprehensive, collaborative and continuous testing platform for automating quality assurance across the end-to-end SOA environment. It includes dedicated components for validating every step of the implementation, from the data and application level through the presentation layer.