Companies out there are building a ton of services for application to consume these services. They are growing crazy in corporate environments. I am sure they are worried about governing them right, by setting proper policies and business rules around these services. While SOA governance is one aspect of building the services, testing them before deploying them is becoming critical these days. Software vendors call this new QA paradigm as “SOA Validation”, “SOA Testing” among other names. However, the main point of it is about testing your Web Services (QA tools for Web Services testing).
Some of the vendors that I always stumble upon in this space include: Mindreef (my favorite – I have seen their product in action), Amber Point, Solstice Software among my top of mind vendors.
I guess players like Systinet, Mercury (Now HP) and Rational (IBM) are going to play in this space and though they say they have products in this space, I feel that they are not as pure play as these other vendors that I just mentioned.
SOA validation or SOA testing has been a topic in a lot of my recent SOA conversations with customers. Looks like this could take off in a big way soon.
Cheers,
Steve Lokam