Has anyone else noticed that SOA vendors seem to be doing a lot of partnering and integrating these days?

I had stopped doing integration news round-ups, because the news was kinda slow, but lately it seemed I'd seen a few more items than usual, particularly about SOA vendors. This week, my suspicions were confirmed when I saw this piece, "SOA runtime governance pacts for Parasoft, AmberPoint and Software AG, Progress," on SearchSOA.com.

Probably the bigger news here is that Parasoft and AmberPoint announced this week a new closed-loop integrated solution, which marries Parasoft's testing capabilities with AmberPoint's SOA run-time governance tool.

Put simply, it's a virtual testing and quality tool for SOA services and transactions.

As we all know by now, it's really tricky to run performance tests on services. If for some reason you missed that memo, this post will bring you up to date.

Software Development Times delivered the skinny on what this partnership means, in practical terms, for developers and companies. The new integrated tool -- released as an update to Parasoft's SOAtest -- uses AmberPoint's runtime governance tool to feed information about individual services and transactions into Parasoft's quality and testing tool.

If you're worried about sensitive data, the system even lets you self-censor production data so you're in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and their ilk.

But it was the SearchSOA.com article that noticed AmberPoint and Parasoft aren't the only SOA vendors partnering up to deliver better SOA runtime governance. That article notes that Progress also recently partnered with Software AG's webMethods Insight to offer a beefed-up SOA governance tool for SoftwareAG customers. This "agent-based SOA management" tool can help you locate "rogue" services -- which sounds a bit dramatic, but basically means it'll let you see what services are deployed and how.

While most of these deals are partnerships, SearchSOA.com pointed out earlier this month that Oracle bought performance management vendor ClearApp.

Could SOA vendor consolidation be waiting in the wings? Stay tuned.

In other news: SAP users will be interested to know the company unveiled a new version of Business Objects Metadata Management XI this week at its TechEd 2008 conference. TDWI reported this is the first update in two years, calling the release "a case of good -- perhaps impeccable -- timing," adding that SAP just bought Business Objects last October. The new tool now incorporates some of the integration features, such as impact analysis and data lineage capabilities, from Business Object's Data Integrator.

The article was pretty giddy over the tool, which includes a lot of beefed-up integration goodness, but one new capability that really caught my eye was the new "Metapedia" feature. The Metapedia will translate metadata into business definitions. It basically helps you organize and define your terms and link the terms to related metadata objects. That's pretty cool, assuming it functions even remotely as promised, and I would think it'd be helpful in developing taxonomies and ontologies.