BEA ups the service infrastructure stakes... or will, soon
Yesterday the infrastructure software vendor BEA announced its acquisition of software asset repository vendor Flashline. Flashline's flagship product becomes a part of BEA's AquaLogic service infrastructure product line - the AquaLogic Enterprise Repository (ALER for short). It will sit in the AquaLogic Portfolio alongside the Service Registry, which is OEMed from
Systinet Mercury HP.
On the face of it this is not a surprising acquisition, given the high level of agreement in the analyst and vendor community about the importance of SOA repository technology to the value of SOA initiatives. But when I look a bit deeper, I do wonder why BEA didn't end up chomping
Infravio instead. (They might well have tried and failed for some reason, of course - if anyone knows anything about that, let me know!)
Why? Well, Flashline sells a really comprehensive, smart set of tools for storing and managing pretty much any kind of software-related asset you might think of, which is highly regarded. But given BEA's positioning of the repository squarely within its SOA offering, it's fair to assume that BEA was looking for a SOA-focused repository. And here, from a technology standpoint at least, Infravio appears to be a much better fit than Flashline.
Although Flashline does sell a "SOA version" of the Flashline repository which is tuned to the storage and management of some SOA-related assets (XSD documents, WSDL specs, etc), the product doesn't offer functionality geared to the specific challenges of service lifecycles. Given the nature of "services" - that they are more than software assets, they're at least as much about
operational experiences of capabilities - a really SOA-specific repository should offer facilities that link together design- and development-time processes with the middleware and management tools that shape the operational service landscape.
There's nothing to say that BEA couldn't build these facilities on top of a combination of the new AquaLogic Enterprise Repository and its OEMed Service Registry - but at the moment, what BEA has added to its service infrastructure suite is a general-purpose software asset management product. A very sophisticated one, but not one that really dovetails with the nuanced requirements of managing service network lifecycles.
