Moving to SOA requires evolving practices and strategies in addition to the right set of tools and solutions, according to Mindreef and ZapThink. The companies announced a partnership to combine ZapThink’s research and advisory expertise focused on building and maturing sustainable SOA practices with Mindreef’s award-winning SOAPscope® SOA Quality solutions to help establish high-quality SOA in the enterprise.

The move to SOA requires new best practices and policies from a central architect group, together with the correct quality infrastructure that ensures policy compliance and fosters trust and quality for new services. To achieve this, developers, architects and entire teams can leverage a bundled package that includes ZapThink consultation on SOA architecture, design-time governance and best practices, advisory services, and access to ZapThink’s extensive library of SOA research reports and studies, in conjunction with Mindreef SOAPscope Server™.

“As Mindreef continues to serve its Global 2000 customer base, teams within these organizations are looking to maximize the value of our powerful SOA Quality platform by also seeking guidance and expert advice about the best ways to evolve their SOA,” said Frank Moreno, VP of Marketing for Mindreef. “ZapThink is one of the most well respected advisors in the SOA market, so we’re pleased to offer a bundled package to help our customers increase the quality of their SOA implementations, while at the same time improving their practices and strategies in order to achieve organizational and cultural SOA adoption as well as business agility.”

Mindreef SOAPscope Server is the industry’s first and only collaborative platform for shared, on-demand access to SOA quality expertise and assets. Designed for agile SOA development environments, Mindreef SOAPscope Server provides SOA developers, QA teams and service consumers with easy-to-use automated testing tools designed specifically for Web services, contracts and interfaces, combined with design-time governance validation and lifecycle support features for architects, analysts, support and IT. The resulting trust in high-quality services leads to increased adoption and reuse of Web services throughout the SOA.

“Mindreef has pioneered the Web services and SOA market for nearly five years with proven products that address very specific requirements associated with Web services and SOA Quality,” adds Ron Schmeltzer, Senior Analyst at ZapThink. “We’re pleased to team with Mindreef to help companies successfully make the move from rolling out their Web services initiatives to properly implementing and fully realizing the benefits of SOA. The packaged advisory offering provided by ZapThink for Mindreef customers can help end-users make educated, impactful decisions for their business as part of an overall SOA Quality strategy.”

The three key areas of SOA Quality that will be focused in the combined offering include:

Advisory and Implementation for Setting up SOA Councils / Centers of Excellence
The real success of a service-oriented architecture is the combination of best practices, methodologies and approaches, in conjunction with infrastructure to support architectural change. Since SOA requires more than simply using Web Services, and because SOA best practices continue to emerge, successful SOA deployments require thought leadership within the organization that is often represented by a SOA Council or Center of Excellence that keeps the interests and needs of multiple departments as well as the objectives of the business in mind. However, knowledge, experience and understanding of SOA is limited at most companies. A SOA Council requires not only a cultural change, but a platform that can share and promote SOA expertise and success on-demand, for any role on the team. ZapThink and Mindreef now offer a combined approach for setting up SOA Centers of Excellence and Councils, through ZapThink’s advisory services and Mindreef’s quality platforms to execute SOA thought-leadership goals.

Advisory and Implementation of Design-time Governance
SOA Quality management must be a focus at the outset of design and development. Taking a contract-centric, contract-first approach to building SOA applications encourages teams to seek the products they need to begin ensuring quality earlier in the process. This is particularly true in today’s agile development environments. Design-time governance addresses the issues of early quality assurance, policy adoption as well as enforcement, and compliance validation check steps. ZapThink offers advisory services to help companies establish proper governance methodologies, combined with Mindreef’s platform capabilities to facilitate the design-time aspects of governance implementation.

Establishing Trust – An Elusive Element of SOA
Companies struggle to understand how much of the architecture should be centralized and how to build up trust between the different departments. Although the primary characteristics of SOA Quality for any business are agility and reuse, trust is what drives service reuse. Since trust is a key enabler of service reuse and helps to eliminate redundant services or rogue services, the ZapThink and Mindreef combined offering can help companies establish organizational methodologies for fostering trust, combined with Mindreef’s platform capabilities to then enable such trusted organizational structures.