Over the past year or so the currents in the SOA registry repository space have grown in strength such that now not one "pure-play"  vendor remains afloat.  Things began shifting with the aquistion of Systinet by Mercury Interactive, who in turn was aquired by HP.  The current gain strength when BEA aquired Flashline.  The current gain even more strength when Infravio, the last of the "pure-players",  was aquired by webMethods.  Other notable happenings in this space were things like IBM annoucing it’s Websphere Registry Repository, along with its own API, Software AG announces its CentraSuite, the emergence of the open source Java based UDDI registry better known as jUDDI, which only supports UDDI version 2, and the one that people seem to always forget when talking aobut this space the release of Sun Microsystemss’ Sun Registry Repository, based upon the ebXML Registry 3.0 standard.  Now companies such as BEA, Oracle, and TIBCO actually OEM the Systinet registry as part of the SOA offerings.  This may given the impression that these companies, and others, are dependent upon HP and that is not necessarily true.  There are group of vendors who have agrreed to interporate, atleast on paper.  Vendors such as Amberpoint, Actional, Forum Systems, IBM, BEA, and host of others have agreed to join the Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF) founded by Systinet a few years ago.  To date the interoperability seems to be only uni-directional and very limited.  For example, after working with two memebers of GIF, Amberpoint and Systinet, it was discovered that the level of interoperability between Systinet and Amberpoint is such that Amberpoint can inquire about service artifact information published in Systinet but the two don not exchange metrics data like service performance. 

     It was inevitable, something that I’ve been saying for a while now, that SOA registries would become nothing more than a commodity.  Many of the products mentioned here support at least one version of the UDDI sepcification, now at release 3.0.  SOA practitioners needed a common, standard, protocol to communicate with SOA registries and UDDI gives us that.  So now we have an enterprise catalog for storing endpoints for service interfaces, typically Web Service Description Language (WSDL) file URLs, that also proivdes some elementary management, governance, features.  Howerver, most people have come to realize that UDDI simply isn’t enough to truely have SOA governance, you need policy and contract management as well.  Some say that UDDI is the foundation of governance, I disagree with that statement.  The foundations for governance are the afore mentioned policies and contracts, which are typically implemented using WS-Policy and other related standards.  These policies and contracts are generally handled by an SOA repository.  There is a debate about how much integration there should be between the registry and repository, a single product or multiple modules with touch points, me I have no preference as long as the product(s) provides full lifecycle governance.

     Developer’s will use the SOA reigstry repository in ordrr to discover capabilities and service endpoint locations and publish service information and artifatcs. These processes require design-time governance.  At runtime, SOA ecosystem components will share similar information, including policy and contract information which provides runtime governance, utilizing the UDDI protocol to query the registry repository.  A registry repository should also provide change time governance features.