SOA Software and AmberPoint are bolstering SOA and Web-services management, with SOA Software focused on BEA Systems middleware and AmberPoint verifying SOA operations.

SOA Software on Tuesday is announcing Service Manager for BEA AquaLogic, which offers Web-services management for BEA AquaLogic middleware.

"It provides security, management, and governance for BEA"s AquaLogic platform," said Ian Goldsmith, vice president of product marketing at SOA Software.

SOA Software was formerly known as Digital Evolution.

Featured is service-level agreement monitoring and management based on a policy model. Distributed fault management and alerting is also provided through monitoring of Web services for security violations.

For management of policy metadata, Service Manager integrates with a UDDI directory to discover policy and service metadata stored in a built-in metadata repository. Moreover, end-to-end auditing in Service Manager maintains audit records, including optional message data, to cover transactions that AquaLogic executes.

Shipping immediately, Service Manager for BEA AquaLogic costs US$5,000 per CPU.

AmberPoint, meanwhile, has announced SOA Validation System, which is intended to verify the functionality and capacity of production-class SOAs.

Using message traffic collected from run-time use of SOA applications, SOA Validation System verifies services against dependent applications. In an SOA environment, a single service, such as a credit check, becomes part of several applications, said Ed Horst, AmberPoint vice president of marketing.

"If you"re going to make a change to that service that"s shared across a whole bunch of different applications," Horst said, "you need some way of testing to ensure that all the other applications that were using the service previously will continue to work properly."

Impacts of updates and policy changes on services-based systems are checked to ensure the SOA performs as expected. Sensitive messages can be masked or encrypted.

The package provides validation rules to account for differences inherent to preproduction, such as time stamps. It also supports load testing and capacity planning and verifies performance goals and new policies. Additionally, SOA Validation System simulates production services outside the immediate control of the project or department.

Intended for use in multiplatform environments, SOA Validation System can reduce production downtime and enable planning for growth, AmberPoint said.

Shipping in the fourth quarter, pricing for SOA Validation System will start at $35,000 per server.