"Managing SOAs devolves to managing the metadata that (SOAs) instantiates, and governing SOA is about governing metadata," he said. "Managing the

Interdependencies will be a key metric of SOA governance."'

The BEA news, following Mercury (now HP) and Webmethods is evidence that the days of stand-alone repository vendors are drawing to a close, said Jess Thompson, a research vice president at Gartner.

"Infrastructure vendors are starting to pile up customer requests that can only be solved by managing the metadata associated with the large number of artifacts that go into (SOAs)," he said.

For example, customers want the ability to centrally manage and track WSDL (Web Services Description Language) for services and see everywhere they are being used, he said.