WebLayers Inc., which specializes in automated service-oriented architecture governance, has announced the release of WebLayers Center 4.0 for the IBM SOA Foundation.

WebLayers, based in Cambridge, Mass., announced the new product at the IBM Impact 2007 conference here. The company has built upon its SOA Policy Management tool to deliver this new release, which the company claims can significantly reduce the cost and risk associated with manual governance.

WebLayers Center 4.0 automates SOA governance with an independent, cross-platform policy management solution. The product is based on a collection of pre-built policies that enable WebLayers to provide governance enforcement from design-time to run-time. Moreover, company officials said WebLayers Center 4.0 expands the governance capabilities of IBM's WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. It introduces additional policy enforcement "governors" for the IBM SOA Foundation, including WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server, and IBM's newly announced Rational Asset Manager, which helps customers gain greater business intelligence on development-time software assets.

"In order for SOA initiatives to succeed, you must have a strong SOA governance strategy," said L. Frank Kenney, research director at Gartner. "Every SOA deployment requires a system that provides policy management. The majority of enterprise customers are taking a best-of-breed approach to SOA governance and the policy management solution must be interoperable with all of the multi-vendor infrastructure that supports the SOA lifecycle."

Gregg Bjork, CEO of WebLayers, said in a statement, "Regardless of where an enterprise falls in their SOA maturity and adoption level, a strong policy management strategy is an essential element for success. Through our close partnerships with all major SOA platform vendors, we enable customers to leverage all of their existing investments in infrastructure products such as registries/repositories, development and deployment systems, and runtime management platforms."

Source