SOA Software and iTKO announced a combined solution for continuous management and quality assurance across the entire design, development and change lifecycle of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) applications. The integrated offering includes iTKO's LISA Testing, Validation and Virtualization suite, and SOA Software's Policy Manager and Service Manager solutions.

Joint customers of the solution will benefit from:

• A high level of continuous quality assurance for risk mitigation within SOA Governance processes with less manual effort and cost
• Better compliance and control of defined Service Policies, with automated enforcement throughout the SOA design, development and change lifecycles to ensure business requirements are being met
• Increased collaboration and efficiency among all SOA stakeholders, so consumers and providers of services can complete their development, testing, integration and deployment activities in parallel, through the virtualization of service endpoints as well as simulating the behaviors of underlying systems

"In short, SOA governance is about ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are operating as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality." said Frank Kenney, Gartner. "The integration and monitoring of the three discrete SOA governance technologies (policy management, registry and testing) are essential to successful governance."

The two companies have focused their solutions exclusively on the need for secure, reliable, and relevant SOA and distributed enterprise integration architectures since their inception. The combined solution makes sense for enterprises seeking to manage complex, heterogeneous service assets to ensure that business requirements are met, while mitigating the risk of inevitable change in underlying systems such as ESB/messaging, databases, mainframes and other custom and legacy applications.

"Compliance in SOA goes far deeper than ensuring the right integration and security protocols are in place," said Frank Martinez, executive vice president, SOA Software. "By delivering SOA Software's comprehensive, centralized SOA planning, lifecycle and operational governance automation, with iTKO LISA's ability to continuously automate the validation and virtualization of service assets managed by our solutions, we can ensure the agility and quality our customers demand from SOA."

"The ability to execute Policy Validation with LISA directly from within SOA Software's management platform creates a true automation framework for SOA Governance efforts," said John Michelsen, founder and chief scientist, iTKO. "By taking much of the latency out of the process of Policy validation, teams responsible for producing and consuming services can break their dependency on each other, and collaborate on meeting defined business requirements throughout the design, delivery and change lifecycles of SOA."

Features of the combined solution for SOA Software and iTKO customers include:

• Continuous compliance and quality automation from concept to production support for SOA, with LISA validation natively executed as part of the workflows within SOA Software Policy Manager.
• High visibility into SOA Policy compliance levels, with all tests, test results, endpoint data, and models viewed in a single repository
• Dramatic increase in the types of SOA Policy that can be modeled and validated, ensuring reliable service level outcomes
• Service Virtualization of endpoints, locations and binding properties from SOA Software combined with simulation of service behaviors and data from iTKO.Enhanced runtime validation of live SOA applications for both functional and performance purposes

iTKO and SOA software are currently proving the value of the combined solution at a major health industry customer, and will cooperate in continued joint marketing and methodology development, to ensure successful adoption of SOA Governance, Quality and Validation practices in the field.