News

ASG Fires Starter Gun for SOA

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• June 6, 2005

Enterprises vying to take advantage of the capabilities in service-oriented architecture now have another product to choose from—Allen Systems Group recently released its SOA starter kit.

The SOA Starter Kit is designed to grow early SOA efforts into an enterprise-class SOA offering, and into a full-feature enterprise-wide repository. It would help companies discover, understand, document and manage their SOA-based enterprise applications and more easily implement SOA products.

The kit, which sells for $50,000, includes a license for five concurrent users and features components for Web services, such as J2EE and .NET, Enterprise JavaBeans, and UDDI.

The SOA Starter Kit uses the ASG-becubic repository, which recognizes more than 100 technologies, including programming, command, middleware and database management systems, in both legacy and distributed environments. Its repository offers various metadata management features, including application portfolio management, data warehousing, packaged applications, enterprise architecture, application discovery and understanding, data management and integration, and data dictionary management. As it discovers application components running in a company’s distributed environment, ASG-becubic automatically updates its inventory with application component and usage information.

According to Gartner’s Michael Blechar, ASG’s SOA Starter Kit could alter the SOA repository market.

“ASG is now the only vendor with an entry-level SOA repository capable of being upgraded to a proven enterprise-class solution,” Blechar says.

The repository market is split into two tiers: Computer Associates International and ASG are in the first tier, offering enterprise-class repository products focused on legacy modernization and understanding. The kicker is pricing; these products cost anywhere from $150,000 to more than $1 million.

In the second tier, vendors including Flashline and LogicLibrary sell less-complex repositories focused on SOA software assets, and these products range from $50,000 to $250,000.

“While the strength of ASG’s offerings makes it the leader in the Tier 1 metadata repository market, until now it has been slow to pursue Tier 2 SOA repository products,” he says. “This announcement has the potential to change the dynamics of the repository market by enabling ASG to better compete with smaller vendors that have been selling SOA repository solutions.”