Policy Looms Large at BEA World 2007

Greetings from BEA World 2007. It’s been a great week in San Francisco and we’ve had some great conversations on SOA governance with customers, prospects and BEA personnel.

One of the most interesting presentations from BEA was entitled “The Importance of Policy in SOA.” BEA recognizes an appropriately broad definition of policy – from design to development to runtime. They see the agility from SOA coming from a policy-based approach versus the rigidity of embedding policy within application logic.

Today BEA has a number of products that each provides a stove-pipe approach to managing policies. They discussed their roadmap to address policy requirements. The first part of the roadmap was the delivery of the new AquaLogic Registry Repository (see below).

The next delivery will be a policy management platform to centrally author, manage and push policies to various decision points and enforcement points (agents) along the lifecycle.

BEA clearly understands the value of having policy management decoupled from the enforcement points. I applaud their vision.
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The new AquaLogic Registry Repository V3 was announced on Tuesday. BEA has packaged the enterprise repository (formerly Flashline) together with the service registry (OEM from Systinet). There are two interesting elements in this offering:

1) The integration of workflow capabilities – this helps automate the process of moving assets through the service lifecycle. This is a good first step but doesn’t address if the services/artifacts conform to standards or architectural policies in an automated fashion. This is critical information to have in making the decision to promote services through the lifecycle.

2) Metadata Interoperability Framework (MDIF) - is a Java-based API for reading metadata from BEA and third party products, expressing the metadata in SCA form, and interacting with ALRR (submit, link, search and download). This makes it easier for third parties to integrate once and eventually share throughout the BEA products. It is also useful in a broader context to express support for SCA.

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On a side note... VMworld was held adjacent to the BEA show and was packed. The official count was 11,000 participants and it sure had a positive vibe. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a show and seen so many free t-shirts, magicians, and the good old “money machine” (where people try to catch dollar bills being blown about in a glass booth).