developerWorks: Welcome to this developerWorks podcast. I'm your host, Scott Laningham. Our guest this time is Sunil Murthy, product manager for IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. He's going to talk with us about WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, or WSRR for short. Sunil, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Murthy: Glad to be here, Scott.

developerWorks: Now, first of all what is WSRR? I mean, what does it do?

Murthy: Well, if you think about what customers are doing with SOA, the very first thing, one of the first things that customer end up doing is really to get an understanding of where are my services, what are my services, to get a visibility of these services in my SOA. And also to have a standard way to publish and find these services. So what we are really focusing on with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is to really enable these basic, fundamental aspects for a successful SOA in providing a standardized service registry and repository for publish and find capabilities for these services.

developerWorks: Well, that makes sense. I mean, obviously they start to grow in number rapidly, I would assume. So you're really going to be in trouble if you can't track them, right?

Murthy: Absolutely.

developerWorks: There's some obvious things there already in value and benefits, but speak a little more about what customers look for or see in terms of value and benefits in a product like WSRR.

Murthy: Well, the very first thing that customers start to realize is when embarking on an SOA, one of the first things is reuse aspect in terms of making sure I can reuse my services once I have the visibility of the services that I have in my infrastructure. And what that enables us to really eliminate these redundancies in reinventing the wheel, so to speak. So it directly addresses the IT pain of poor reuse and duplicate efforts, which is also an increase in cost.

Now, having a service registry with services and visible, the SOA runtimes can really get enriched with the [authoritative] service metadata in the service registry depositories. Now, you may ask, why is that necessary? Well, think about trying to make a small change in your infrastructure. How about providing the metadata-driven infrastructure where the change is really propagated automatically to your service infrastructure through the service segistry repository. And that directly addresses the maintenance cost in maintaining a very flexible infrastructure.

developerWorks: I see.

Murthy: And last but not least is really in the area of governance. Think about services that are blooming all across the SOA infrastructure — ability to drive a consistent life cycle, ability to analyze the impacts of introducing services or retiring a service. Because think about it: Services are loosely coupled in an SOA, and if you don't have a good visibility of dependencies, you're going to have somebody really mad in the SOA infrastructure if you take out a service without notifying them.

developerWorks: Right. OK. So we're IBM, we're talking about our product in this marketplace. Now what makes WSRR unique? Why do you think someone would choose it over another solution?

Murthy: Well, that's a great question because we've seen considerable consolidation in this marketplace since last year with companies, pure-play vendors, and service registry depository being acquired left, right, and center. And that's not stopped. So what we are seeing is really customers trying to understand "Well, where does this niche vendor going to be ultimately acquired?"

Instead of giving the uncertainty that the competitors in this marketplace created, what IBM has [done] is really provide a very stable, very strategic and customer-centric solution, which directly addresses the pain points that I mentioned before in terms of reuse, governance and enriching the SOA infrastructure. So really, what we are bringing to the table is a set of very superior capabilities, very stable and focused capabilities, that is highly integrated with the SOA foundation infrastructure with the robust clustering and scalable aspect which really, you know, you're looking at depending on a reliable infrastructure here.

developerWorks: So, Sunil, could you talk a bit then about some primary areas where customers have incorporated WSRR into their SOA needs?

Murthy: Sure, sure. This directly ties into your previous question. You think about the integration that we bring with SOA Foundation. The integration in the area of ESB products, which IBM has with [WebSphere] Message Broker, with WebSphere [Enterprise Service Bus] (ESB), with Data Power, all these ESB products really depend and rely on WebSphere service registry for authoritative, authentic service metadata so that your infrastructure is bulletproof, if you will — or I would say, futureproof. So that there's no really inflexible aspects to the infrastructure. So that's the one integration adoption that we have seen with the ESBs.

Now you can also think about, when we think about reuse, think about all the IDEs out there, such as Rational® Application Developer, Software Architect, WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Modeler, any of these Eclipse-based IDEs, the ability to easily find services and publish services that's what we are empowering, WebSphere Service Registry Repository Eclipse plug-ins, so that we really advocate and we really do walk the talk in terms of enabling reuse at any stage of your SOA adoption.

Now the third thing that we are seeing is also in the SOA management because governments and service life cycle are very closely related to this overall SOA management space and we've got a total integration with our IBM Tivoli® Composite Application Manager — which goes with ITCAM as an acronym — for SOA. That enables the overall SOA management aspect with the service registry repository.

So you can see how we are rounding out our capabilities with not only enabling with infrastructure runtimes but also management and design development-time IDE integration.

developerWorks: OK. Now, you talked about "futureproof." Now what about looking ahead? What new things can people expect to see maybe this year, even, with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository?

Murthy: Well, as I mentioned, we are very aggressive in terms of making sure we are constantly nimble in adapting to customer needs. So we've got a creative development approach, which basically one that means we take customer input and requirements and put out an iteration and hand it off back to the customer saying, "Is that what you need? Is that meeting your requirement?" And then we finetune the product based on the feedback we received. And we've been doing this for the past year or so, and we are at a stage where we are almost close to 14th iteration, so you can see how the product has really matured, even though we are really at a 6.02 version level. And what the customers can expect to see is the continuing availability of this early-access program wherein we continue to get feedback and release these early-access code drops to customers and major releases are milestones appropriate timeframes. And having said that, we are looking at another major release apart from the 6.02 in May, we are looking at another release perhaps end of this year is where our roadmap takes us.

developerWorks: Well, great. Now, what about as a wrap-up, places to go for listeners to find out some more about WebSphere Service Registry and Repository? We just kind of gave them an intro here, where should they go on the Web to read more about it?

Murthy: Really, the best place to go is go into ibm.com/soa Web site, and you'll see the products page has WebSphere Service Registry and Repository listed with a bunch of whitepapers and collateral, which is supportive of the information that I have just introduced here. And there's also a link to the product launch page, which has a very rich set of library articles, including a very comprehensive IBM Redbook, which talks about the clustering, the deployment, the adoption of the product capabilities at customer locations. So I would strongly encourage those resources and again, ibm.com/soa is a good starting place.

developerWorks: Great. And of course, people can also reference the SOA and Web services zone on developerWorks for more information, as well. And I'll include both of those links in the show notes for this podcast, which people can find at ibm.com/developerWorks/podcast.

Sunil, thanks so much for giving us a quick look at WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. We really appreciate your time today.

Murthy: It's really my pleasure. And we're really looking forward to expand the capabilities based on the feedback that we are continuing to receive from this audience. So keep it coming. Thank you very much.

developerWorks: My guest again was Sunil Murthy, product manager for IBM WebSphere Services Registry and Repository. Be sure again and check the show notes for this developerWorks podcast, for links related to this topic, and you can find that again at ibm.com/developerWorks/podcast. I'm Scott Laningham, thanks for listening.

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About the author

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

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