Enterprises need information and application visibility across their IT environment, regardless of how far along they are in their plans to implement an enterprise-wide Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Without visibility into the workings of the systems, applications, and other elements of their IT infrastructure, businesses are unable to manage or improve their IT environment, and most importantly, meet their business requirements. Today, however, only a few companies have implemented SOAs. As companies build such architectures, the need for visibility becomes even more acute, because an SOA represents an abstraction layer that masks the complexity of the underlying technology while at the same time providing greater power and agility to the business user. Thus, in an SOA, both IT and business users require visibility into the workings of the SOA at some level.
The key to this visibility in both types of situations is metadata: information about the elements of the SOA. To provide adequate IT visibility, companies must follow basic metadata best practices for discovering and organizing metadata, encapsulating business logic in metadata, managing with metadata, and modeling with metadata. While there are many metadata management solutions on the market, few are able to provide the visibility needed for IT personnel in traditional integration environments, as well as those transitioning to and running SOAs. The IQ Server from Metallect is just such a solution.
