Wily Technology Senior Product Manager Karen Jaworski took some time to answer specific questions SOA Web Services Journal had regarding Wily's recent announcement of the company's new Web Services Manager product. Here's what we asked, and what she said:

SOA WSJ:  By announcing a product that focuses on monitoring web services applications, are you saying that SOAs provide unique challenges in terms of their availability? And if so, what are some of those unique challenges?

Karen Jaworski: The largest challenge being introduced by SOA’s today is the dependence of multiple applications upon centralized functionality. If this functionality fails, the IT organization must deal with outages across the enterprise. Thus, performance and availability of shared services become a critical component of business performance. For large scale customer-facing applications, the performance of SOA’s will translate directly into revenue won or lost.

To ensure services can meet performance expectations, it is absolutely vital that IT adequately forecast and manage service usage and load characteristics. We’ve heard stories from various customers about the problems they’ve faced in this area. IT thought that a service was only being used by a handful of applications. Come to find out, the service was actually being leveraged by about 35 different applications across the company. Unless you are monitoring and reporting upon service traffic in a production environment, how could you anticipate rapid service adoption? And how could your capacity planners ever accurately size the service environment?

Another problem that tends to get customers into hot water is the usage of development services in a production environment. Being able to see which services are connected in a real environment is critical to managing a SOA environment. And, incidentally, this is a problem that customers are solving today with Wily technology.

Finally, SOA’s present troubleshooting and diagnosis challenges. When we look at today’s enterprise computing environments we see that heterogeneity is the norm – hardly any company uses technology from only a single vendor. SOA facilitates the integration of these disparate technologies to handle business transactions and processes. In such a topology, how do you trace a transaction, much less manage it to an SLA? The more forward-thinking organizations we work with see these challenges as an opportunity to break down application silos to create cross-functional, business-oriented teams that are responsible for managing transaction-oriented service levels.