WebSphere Service Registry and Repository

Service oriented architecture (SOA) has the potential to drive business agility, business-process vitality, reuse of your existing services, improved connectivity and closer alignment of IT to business. Making the most of this potential depends on how well you govern and manage the services in your SOA. Businesses without proper governance and management risk losing control over their services. They face barriers to reusing services, such as redundant services, misalignment with business processes, and lack of application consistency and integrity.

Store, access and manage information to support a successful SOA IBM: WebSphere® Service Registry and Repository version 6.1 provides management and governance capabilities that enable you to get the most business value from your SOA. It facilitates storing, accessing and managing service information, called service metadata, so that you can easily select, invoke, govern and reuse your services. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository has tight integration with IBM SOA Foundation, an integrated, open standards-based set of software, best practices and patterns for SOA. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is an essential component of your SOA.

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is an industrial-strength tool that enables you to publish, find, enrich, manage and govern services in your SOA.

Encourage reuse: The publish and find capabilities of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository promote service reuse in SOA projects by providing greater visibility of and easier access to existing services. The Service discovery engine discovers services on both IBM WebSphere Application Server and Microsoft® .NET platforms, allowing you to keep an accurate record of deployed services in your SOA. Faceted search provides a natural and user-friendly way to find services by allowing you to progressively refine search results using attributes, document types or classification.

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository helps in quickly creating or modifying business processes using existing services. A powerful query mechanism allows you to search and find the services that best fit the requirements of a given process.

Enhance connectivity: The enrich capability enables dynamic and efficient access to services information by both runtime applications and processes that facilitate better connectivity and efficiency. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository increases runtime flexibility of applications integrated by an enterprise service bus (ESB) by enabling selection of services based on service metadata.

Optimize service usage: The manage capability enables management of service metadata, as well as service interactions, dependencies and redundancies. You can classify services based on business objectives, manage policies for service usage and monitor how services are changed and versioned. Also, you can link related binary documents (such as Word and PDF files) to service metadata. This capability helps you optimize the use of services in an SOA by exchanging rich service metadata with runtime monitoring tools and operational data stores.

Enable enterprise governance: The govern capability of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository enables SOA governance in the service lifecycle by providing:

• Access control: You can control the visibility and access to service metadata for sharing and reuse by using role-based access. Using the access-control editor, you can easily set up access-control rules that align with your business.

• Service classification: You can classify services and related metadata into groups that are meaningful in the domain of your organization and that align with your business needs. Using the classification editor, you can improve productivity by easy set-up and modifications to your classification schemas.

• Impact analysis: By maintaining relationships, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository has extensive support for analyzing the impact of service introduction, deletion or alteration. Graphical views help you intuitively understand the service relationships and dependencies.

• Service life cycle: By creating user-definable entities and customizing the service life cycle, you can configure WebSphere Service Registry and Repository precisely according to your business needs. You can easily implement best practices for service life-cycle management with the ability to promote services and life-cycle validations. Using customizable validators, you can guard transitions in the life-cycle states of services.

• Policy support: You can publish policies that apply to services stored in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository such as WS-Policy. These policies are enforced by runtime clients such as an ESB, and help you institute best practices in your SOA deployment.

• Governance profile: To help you get started easily and quickly, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository provides a well-defined service model that includes templates, associated life cycles, governance policies with a generic validator, a classification system, roles and perspectives.

Federate with other SOA repositories: WebSphere Service Registry and Repository federates with other SOA repositories to enable governance and management of the complete service life cycle. At the model and assemble phases, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is complemented by repositories that specialize in managing SOA development artifacts. In the deploy and manage phases, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository can work with a configuration management databases to acquire and manage operational details of your IT infrastructure. Also, tight integration with WebSphere Business Services Fabric allows you to link business and technical aspects of composite business services.

Enable governance and life-cycle management of your high-value applications: WebSphere Service Registry and Repository helps your high-value applications to participate fully in enterprise SOA. Service enabled applications from IBM WebSphere MQ and IBM CICS can be published in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository enabling you to reuse, classify, describe and govern these services like any other service in your SOA.