The Week of the Registry

It's the week of the UDDI registry, as two more registry vendors join Systinet in announcing enhancements to their registry offerings. SOA Software (more recently known as Digital Evolution) announced today that for a limited time it is offering its UDDI v3 complilant Registry product for free. SOA Software hopes to drive adoption of SOA by offering the Registry for free and hopes that enterprises will adopt the UDDI registry as their core meta-data repository, which fuels run-time discovery of services in an SOA Infrastructure. The next e-mail in my inbox, literally the very next e-mail, was an announcement from competitor Infravio, announcing it had extended UDDI Features in Governance Focused SOA Registry product, Infravio X-registry. Like Systinet's announcement, Infravio is focusing on governance and business use of its registry for managing services in both the fledgling and advanced SOA infrastructure.

UDDI registries have, until now, been a relatively underutilized piece of the SOA infrastructure. As SOA as heated up and more services have been cropping up in enterprise deployments - both custom developed and through upgrades and installations of packaged applications - the need to discover, categorize and manage services has grown and now the SOA Registry players are gearing up, ready to provide a solution.A UDDI registry need not be part of a larger SOA management offering, such as those offered by AmberPoint, Actional and SOA Software or even part of an existing application platform such as IBM's WebSphere or BEA's WebLogic. Because an SOA infrastructure depends on interoperable standards and all communication takes place via open standards, the SOA infrastructure may be one of the first where a best of breed set of applications may actually be a viable solution.