SOA Link Responds to Surging Demand for Testing, Quality Assurance; iTKO, Mindreef, Parasoft, Solstice Software Join SOA Link.

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- SOA Link, a group of companies focused on delivering interoperable solutions for deployment of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), today announced four testing and quality assurance vendors have joined the organization. With the addition of iTKO, Inc., Mindreef, Inc., Parasoft Corporation, and Solstice Software, SOA Link is meeting the surge in demand for SOA testing and service quality.

For many organizations embracing SOA, testing and service quality are emerging as hot-button issues. In particular, the loose coupling of discrete services dictated by SOA can significantly increase the number of integration points for any given application, thereby increasing the potential for application failure. Similarly, changes to an individual service can destabilize a previously stable application that calls those services.

Case in point, the SOA Link integration between members Mindreef and Infravio has been largely pioneered by an enterprise scale customer providing heavily regulated healthcare services in the southern region of the United States. This organization is consolidating five departments and extranet-based partners. In order to maintain and improve their interdependent services, quality assurance is a necessity and, in practical terms, requires complete visibility of metrics in the Infravio SOA registry repository with the Mindreef SOAPscope.

"Enterprise SOA makes organizations increasingly interdependent with service providers outside and across lines of business," said Miko Matsumura, vice president of technology standards at Infravio, Inc., organizer of the SOA Link initiative. "To support these relationships, testing frameworks will both feed information to and enforce assertions about quality made in the registry repository."

iTKO - www.itko.com

iTKO, Inc. is a leading provider of complete testing solutions for SOA software. iTKO's complete software suite for testing SOAs allows multiple business technology layers to be exercised within a single test case. For more details, see the iTKO news release at http://www.itko.com/site/company/news_29.jsp.

"SOA Link gets to the heart of what we have been trying to accomplish," said Jim Mackay, chief marketing officer, iTKO, Inc. "Companies are trying to leverage the critical components within their existing applications as well as to blend them with emerging technologies for a competitive edge. While the current standards enable widespread adoption of SOA, supporting the ever-growing set of integration points between the elements of the infrastructure increases the complexity and risk of enterprise development. SOA Link ensures that all of these organizations work together for interoperability so the end user will be able to better integrate Service Oriented Architectures into their businesses. It is a win-win for everyone involved."

Mindreef - www.mindreef.com

Mindreef, Inc. provides tools and infrastructure that help organizations drive quality into their SOA deployments. The company's products enable business analysts, architects, application developers, testers, operations, and support staff to perform quality-related tasks or access quality-related artifacts at any time. For more details, see the Mindreef news release at http://www.mindreef.com/weblog/more/308_0_1_0_C/.

"Mindreef is firmly committed to promoting quality-driven SOA, so we consider joining SOA Link a positive step for us and our customers," said Frank Grossman, founder and president of Mindreef. "Driving industry-wide SOA quality will greatly reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy high quality, reusable Web services, while assuring agility and adaptability as teams scale SOA to the enterprise level."

Parasoft - www.parasoft.com

Parasoft Corporation is the leading provider of Automated Error Prevention solutions for software development. Its automated software test, analysis and SOA policy enforcement solution for Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementations lets organizations establish, enforce and practice SOA development governance during the development and QA processes.

"The key to SOA is consistency," said Wayne Ariola, vice president of corporate development for Parasoft. "In order to achieve consistency, organizations must have a method to clearly delineate their expectations as they provision and version services. SOA Link is the right step in the right direction to achieve consistency. Parasoft with our SOA aware testing framework, Parasoft SOAtest, will enforce consistency and quality during development lifecycle. The SOA Link initiative will significantly assist in promoting mission critical quality."

Solstice Software - www.solsticesoftware.com

Solstice Software is the leader in end-to-end integration and SOA testing. The company's automated, end-to-end integration and SOA testing software lets large organizations automate testing across complex environments by leveraging powerful testing, business process validation and simulation capabilities against a range of industry-standard protocols and SOA platforms. For more details, see the Solstice news release at http://www.prnewswire.com/news/index_mail.shtml?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/ story/07-11-2006/0004394749&EDATE=. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

"SOA's impact is more than just at the technical infrastructure level," said Chris Benedetto, vice president of marketing for Solstice Software. "SOA is a way of creating business value through orchestrated governance, quality assurance, middleware, and standardization efforts. Solstice Software is committed to the interoperability goals of SOA Link and believes that a commitment to SOA Link is a commitment to quality and agility."

About SOA Link

SOA Link, www.soalink.com, is an end-to-end SOA Governance interoperability initiative. Organized by Infravio, Inc., SOA Link brings together multiple vendors with products for SOA Governance to mutually interoperate. Whether supplying a policy repository and authoring system, run time enforcement system, monitoring run time testing and quality assurance, or business process capability, these systems will be delivered as interoperable by leading vendors and technologies. Participants benefit by having the ability to publish services and associated policy to a system of record in a standardized way, and to be alerted to changes when they happen. SOA Link members include AmberPoint, Composite Software, Forum Systems, HP, Infravio, Intalio, IONA, iTKO, JBoss, Layer 7 Technologies, LogicBlaze, Mindreef, NetIQ, Parasoft, Reactivity, SOA Software, Solstice Software, SymphonySoft, and webMethods.