Todd Biske: Outside the Box

The press releases came out today that SOA Software has bought LogicLibrary, with blogosphere comments from Miko Matsumura, Dana Gardner, and Jeff Schneider. I see this as a step toward the bigger SOA platform players by SOA Software. At this point, most of the players in SOA platforms all now have a registry/repository offering. IBM has WebSphere Registry Repository, Oracle/BEA has AquaLogic Registry Repository (consisting of the OEM’d Systinet and purchased Flashline products), Tibco resells Systinet, SoftwareAG has the former WebMethods/Infravio, Iona has Artix Registry/Repository, SAP has their Enterprise Service Repository, and Microsoft has their Oslo efforts. I think it’s safe to say that the vendors that are trying to be the acquirer rather than the acquired have all realized that a registry/repository is the center of the SOA technology universe. Now if only they could talk to each other easily along with the CMDBs of the ITIL technology world.

In my “Future of ESBs” post, I talked about how selling an ESB on its own is a difficult proposition because of the relative value that a developer will place on it. The same thing certainly holds true for a registry/repository, and I think the market has shown that to be the case by now having all of the registry/repository providers get swallowed up by larger fish. It would be interesting to know how many times these products are sold on their own versus being bundled in as a value-add with a larger purchase.