Part 1 of this blog topic introduced the notion of how complex and tricky it can be to manage and govern enterprise applications’ service oriented architecture (SOA). That blog post also tackled Progress Software’s recent acquisition of Mindreef in order to round out its SOA governance solution for distributed information technology (IT) environments.
Mindreef joined the Progress Actional SOA Management product family that provides policy-based visibility, security, and control for services, middleware, and business processes. This acquisition continues Progress’ expansion of its burgeoning SOA portfolio and strengthens the company’s position as a leader in independent, standards-based, heterogeneous, distributed SOA enterprise infrastructures.
Prior to being acquired, Mindreef decoupled some plug-in features from its previously all-in-one SOAPscope Server suite.
One capability was SOAPscope Policy Rules Manager that tests compliance with rules such as whether the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) headers comply with the WS-I Basic Profile for Web services interoperability. Also, the feature checks whether the extensible markup language (XML) schema was formed properly, and whether the “contracts” between Web services are valid so that companies can ensure they won’t break at run-time because of faulty logic.
Another plug-in, called Load Check, provides a pre-test simulation of the system’s performance. The underlying idea was to mitigate the bad practice that, when developing Web services-based applications, the load or performance testing tends to be an afterthought that is often compensated for by purchasing extra hardware after the fact and at a hefty price.
Progress Actional + Mindreef
Like its parent, Mindreef has always designed its products as a good fit for third-party IT governance solutions, with the ability to check on whether Web services are well formed and remain consistent with business policies.
Progress does not release the number of customers it has for specific products or as a corporation, although it admits to gaining access to more than 3,000 of Mindreef’s customers at more than 1,200 organizations worldwide. The ideal customers for the combination of Progress Actional and Mindreef SOAPscope are those seeking full life-cycle quality management of their SOA environments, ranging from design through operational deployment.
Mindreef SOAPscope is a recognized testing and validation software product for SOA services at the design stage, while Actional is the market leading SOA management, validation and monitoring software for operational SOA. Thus, the combination of the two provides a solution that is likely to be the first in the market to address the entire SOA lifecycle with SOA quality, validation, and runtime governance.
Progress Actional and Mindreef provide a deep level of SOA management, testing, validation and run-time governance functionality, but not all organizations that have begun implementing SOA environments recognize the need to implement that functionality as yet. As a result, those companies that have felt the significant pain of having to diagnose why SOA composite applications have failed in order to get them rapidly back up and running, or who have discovered rogue Web services within their environments into which they have no visibility, should see the benefit of deploying Progress Actional and Mindreef.
Progress Actional and Mindreef are sold worldwide from offices in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. A complete list of Progress Software offices is available here.
While hardly any player in the market currently has equal lifecycle SOA quality capabilities as the combination of Actional and Mindreef provides, traditional competitors for Actional include Amberpoint, SOA Software, IBM, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Layer 7 Technologies and Computer Associates (CA).
As for Mindreef, while it can also be hard to find a single product that functionally competes head to head with SOAPScope, some other vendors’ functionality is comparable to that found in SOAPScope. Namely, in sales situations, Mindreef sometimes runs across IBM Rational Software and HP/Mercury, and occasionally some of the smaller niche players like Parasoft Solutions, iTKO LISA, PushToTest, and Crosscheck Networks.
Forget Not about Oracle Fusion Either
The recent acquisition of the former middleware competitor, BEA Systems, has promoted Oracle into the middleware market leader, at least in the Java world. The idea behind the ambitiously broad Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) suite is the following:
- to enable the enterprise applications’ architecture shift to SOA
- to become a comprehensive platform for developing and deploying service-oriented enterprise applications
- to form the foundation for modernizing and integrating the burgeoning Oracle Applications portfolio
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