Enterprise visibility

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository provides a central point of management and makes all software assets visible, including services and their supporting artifacts. Assets under development can be viewed by teams to prevent redundant development and encourage collaboration and reuse. BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository offers:

• Access to software assets through a rich Web-based user interface (UI), directly from within Eclipse-based (BEA Workshop, IBM, etc.) and Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET™ integrated development environments (IDEs)
• Advanced role-based access control
• Flexible asset categorizations and relationships
• Interactive navigation of asset relationships.

End-to-End Traceability

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository users can organize software assets and link them to the business processes and objectives they support, providing critical visibility into business and IT alignment.

The Navigator graphically maps the dynamic relationships and interdependencies between software assets and projects, yielding information vital to understanding which business areas will be affected by potential changes to software assets.

Lifecycle management

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository supports the entire lifecycle of services and software assets, from planning and design to development, production, versioning, and retirement. Automatic opt-in notifications alert users to new assets and status changes. A flexible registration process and workflow support a company's processes for approving and publishing software assets.

Asset harvesting

One-step publishing of software assets provides a simple, automated way to add them to the repository. Through advanced introspection capabilities and integrations with build tools, BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository automatically harvests metadata, artifacts, and related files from the build process and uses them to populate the repository. For Web services, BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository introspects WSDL and populates the repository with files and service artifacts. With just one click, users can perform impact analysis by graphically mapping dependencies and relationships among these assets in the Navigator.

Govern for results

Implementing BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository at program inception avoids the common and often disastrous mistake of adding governance as an afterthought. BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository manages SOA and other initiatives as a business imperative, maintaining alignment with corporate strategies and tracking business impacts from start to finish.

Align with the business

Using BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository , executives can monitor the progress of SOA and other initiatives based on the software assets that are proposed, funded, and completed. Once a company establishes business goals, it can use BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository to communicate both the existing and to-be states of the architecture, and track progress.

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository provides the framework and controls to keep software assets aligned with the architecture. Architects and managers use the repository's architectural blueprints to ensure that delivered software assets meet architectural standards. Enforcing architectural standards, guidelines, and processes during design and construction ensures that projects and the assets they consume align with business goals, and that the application environment is streamlined for maximum agility.

Manage and enforce policies

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository policy management features promote trust in service and asset quality as well as compliance with standards. Users can apply policies to software assets during design time, and get an automatic summary and graphic display showing the validation and roll-up of policy assertions.

Key policy management features include:

• Sample policies to jump-start policy management, such as WS-I Basic Profile, WS-I Basic Security Profile, WS-Policy Attachments, corporate quality standards, Sarbanes-Oxley, and more
• Status updates on services, informing consumers which ones pass or fail policy validation
• User navigation of policy and validation status for impact analysis and exceptions
• Support for the lifecycle management of the policies themselves.

Create trust

Policy management, combined with access controls and a flexible software asset submission and approval flow, ensure that available software assets meet corporate and industry standards before they are promoted to consumers. BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository compliance reports provide a scorecard for a project's adherence to prescribed standards.

Automated, transparent reuse

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository leverages years of BEA experience in reuse to provide a platform that makes reuse an automated and transparent part of the everyday development experience.

Architects and managers can prescribe software assets and standards and deliver them directly to project teams in their familiar IDE—without wasting time searching for assets. The patent-pending BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository Software File Identification (SFID) technology automatically tracks asset usage and measures compliance with standards without developer intervention. Asset use is captured in the background and tracked during the natural course of development, making reuse a transparent part of the development experience.

Comprehensive, extensible metadata

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository augments software asset metadata with policy compliance and related information, and allows organizations to expose the right information to project teams. Asset artifacts can be downloaded by consumers directly from the repository, even if they are hosted elsewhere.

Integrate SOA into the fabric of IT

Out-of-the-box and custom integrations with a variety of tools provide extreme flexibility in tying software assets and projects to the rest of the enterprise.

Integrations include:

• Project portfolio management systems
• Enterprise architecture tools
• IDEs, including Eclipse-based (BEA Workshop, IBM, etc.) and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
• UDDI registries, including BEA AquaLogic Service Registry
• Source-code management systems
• Software build tools
• Authentication and single sign-on solutions.

Significantly reduce costs

BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository gives managers the information they need to analyze and ensure software asset quality and track the value of those assets to the enterprise. It tracks, measures, and reports on:

• Business value and ROI
• Predicted and actual reported savings from reuse
• Asset usage
• Asset production by project and department
• Project compliance with project planning assumptions and architecture
• Progress on investments.