The Managed Methods SOA product is called JaxView, a services-management, governance and monitoring application with a browser-based front end. You can use JaxView to discover Web services, configure management of services and act as a message broker. JaxView monitors service availability (heartbeat) and enables exception handling for failover capabilities.

MEGA offers two suites of products and complements these products with consulting services. Its products are MEGA Modeling Suite and MEGA GRC Suite. The MEGA Modeling Suite promises to help align software with real business processes. The MEGA GRC Suite is for governance, and handles risk management, standards compliance, internal controls and audit management.

We never MetaMatrix we didn't like. (Granted, that has nothing to do with the company or the product, but we couldn't resist.) Red Hat acquired MetaMatrix, and the software integrates with Red Hat's JBoss application server software. You can use MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform to create data services that use a variety of protocols, including ODBC, JDBC and Web services. In short, it promises robust enterprise data access, data management, data security and integrity capabilities for your JBoss SOA projects.

MuleSource is a set of open-source SOA solutions, including Mule ESB (enterprise service bus), Mule Galaxy (governance), Mule HQ (management and monitoring) and Mule IDE (development and configuration tools based on Eclipse). One of MuleSource's credos is to provide customers with tools that leverage open standards to help them prevent vendor lock-in. MuleSource offers subscription-based access to its products.

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is a non-profit open standards consortium founded in 1993. OASIS started as SGML Open. SGML spawned XML, which is critical for Web services and SOA; XML.org is part of OASIS. OASIS produces standards for security and e-business, and has produced more Web services standards than any other organization.

OASIS defines SOA as "a collection of best practices principles and patterns related to service-aware, enterprise-level, distributed computing." One of OASIS's goals is to develop a reference model for SOA, which OASIS hopes will be a unifying force that preserves the foundational principles of SOA in the face of many differing and sometimes conflicting perceptions of what comprises SOA.

The Technical Committee for SOA includes Duane Nickull, Chair, Francis McCabe, Secretary, Jeff Estefan, Secretary, and James Bryce Clark, OASIS Staff Contact.

The Open Group is a consortium that has coined the trademarked term Boundaryless Information Flow. They describe Boundaryless Information Flow as "open standard components that provide services in a customer's extended enterprise that combine multiple sources of information [and] securely delivers the information whenever and wherever it is needed, in the right context for the people or systems using that information."

Leaving aside the question of whether "Boundryless" is a word, the concept encompasses the heart of SOA, which promotes standards-based interoperability that is not limited by operating systems, programming languages, or other platform or vendor-specific technologies.

The Open Group concerns itself with more than just technology. It is proactive in working with customers, and establishing best practices and polices. The Open Group also produces certification services and products.

The work of the Open Group dovetails nicely with that of OMG. One Open Group goal is to define a SOA Governance Reference Model and develop a common definition for SOA Governance.

OMG is the Object Management Group, an international non-profit computer industry consortium established in 1989. Historically, OMG has been at the heart of several distributed computing initiatives similar to SOA. For example, OMG defined standards such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and OpenDoc, a document-based distributed object model based on CORBA. This makes SOA a familiar domain for OMG.

OMG Task Forces now address enterprise object integration strategies for industries such as Finance, Government, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Manufacturing and Communications, all of which are prime candidates for SOA adoption. OMG produces and manages events such as Object World, EclipseCon, the OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit and the Internationalization & Unicode Conference.

OMG has been a powerful force in distributed computing despite the fact that CORBA has its share of critics and OpenDoc never got off the ground. Given its experience with distributed objects, one might think OMG is a natural for pioneering SOA. But OMG has a less central role in defining SOA-specific standards and technologies. While SOA can employ standards previously driven by OMG, OMG is more involved with advocacy and has a collaborative role with organizations such as W3C, Open Group and OASIS. The SOA ABSIG group is a forum for discussion of SOA definition, methodologies, models, and focuses on business and technical implications such as Business Process Management (BPM) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA).

The Open SOA Collaboration is a group with the goal of defining a language-neutral programming model for SOA. Strictly speaking, Open SOA is not a standards body. If any standards emerge from Open SOA, they will be de-facto standards defined by vendors who are delivering real-world SOA solutions. Open SOA then makes the specifications for these de-facto standards available to the development community on a royalty-free basis. Open SOA intends to hand over the standards to a standards body (such as OASIS) once they mature.

Open SOA primarily concerns itself with two specifications; Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO).

SCA is a programming model for building SOA applications. SCA employs technologies in common use, such as Web services and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). SCA 1.0 was published in March 2007, and Open SOA is working with OASIS for formal standardization.

SDO is designed to provide abstraction for unified access to data in various formats including relational databases, XML-formatted data, data accessed through Web services, and other enterprise data sources.

Open SOA is also involved in the SOA PHP project licensed under version 2 of the Apache license. The goal of SOA PHP is to simplify development of PHP applications as part of an SOA infrastructure.