With planning governance, enterprises can maximize SOA investments by building service to plan and to priority, SOA Software said. IT organizations can better understand dependencies between services and prioritize development. Services can be built based on needs.

[ Lastweek, Burton Group analyst Anne Thomas Manes offered an SOA "obituary," panning the term "SOA" and emphasizing difficulties in acquiring funding for SOA projects during the current down economy. ]

SOA programs, the company said, require strong planning processes to build enterprise services that are generally reusable. Project-specific services will not be flexible enough to support generalized reuse, and without early success, application development teams will not see the potential value in moving to SOA, according to SOA software. SOA portfolio management will help an organizational culture evolve to support successful SOA, SOA Software said.

"SOA Portfolio Management is an important part of a planning governance process that helps ensure the success of enterprise SOA programs," said Brent Carlson, SOA Software vice president, in a statement released by the company. "Our Portfolio Manager product allows our customers to maximize the efficiency of their strategic investment in SOA and helps ensure that they meet their business objectives."

Portfolio Manager helps customers optimize IT investments to become better aligned with business initiatives and become more adaptable to changing requirements, SOA software said. It helps users build an SOA roadmap via modeling, which offers top-down analysis. It also offers asset authentication and portfolio management processes, including service identification, prioritization, and allocation.

The product identifies candidate services from existing assets and target architectures to help companies ensure they build services to plan and priority. It also delivers packaged SOA planning governance methods and automation meta-models for planning governance.

Current and future architecture models are represented based on industry standards and internal definitions. APQC business process frameworks are included to promote compliance with industry best practices. Services are prioritized into SOA Software's Repository Manager product for SOA automation.

Portfolio Manager ensures that SOA governance remains a continuous dynamic process to maximize value and protect investment in portfolio management, SOA Software said.

Available this month, Portfolio Manager pricing starts at $50,000.