The need for specialized testing, management and governance products is becoming more apparent as enterprises get deeper into their service-oriented architecture efforts. The latest vendor to address the gap is Mercury Interactive, which this week is expected to detail a series of new and upgraded products aimed at helping companies keep their SOA projects successful.

At its Mercury World user conference going on in Las Vegas, the software maker will launch two new SOA testing products as well as a new version of Systinet 2, the SOA governance platform Mercury gained in its $105 million acquisition of Systinet earlier this year.

The two new products are Mercury Service Test and Mercury Service Test Management. Based on Mercury's LoadRunner technology, Service Test lets users conduct functional and performance tests for services, including checking for standards compliance and interoperability testing. In addition, service emulation capabilities allow testers to get started early, before services are built.

Service Test Management is designed to help manage the process of testing new and modified services. Users can automatically import services from Mercury's Systinet registry product to create test requirements and plans. The software also can generate test cases based on service changes made in the Systinet registry.

Services can be difficult to test because they do not have a GUI, says Avrami Tzur, vice president of SOA products at Mercury. In addition, all the possible interrelationships among services and the applications they support can make it difficult for IT staff to devise a thorough testing methodology. Testing complexity grows exponentially as the number of interrelated services and applications grows, Tzur says.

"Mercury Service Test deals with the technical aspects of how to test a service -- the lack of a graphical user interface, the need to support multiple protocols, the need to look at what goes on underneath the surface," Tzur says. "Mercury Service Test Management deals with the complexity of testing multiple small applications."

On the governance front, Mercury is upgrading Systinet 2, which already includes a registry and repository, as well as policy management, contract management, and service publishing and discovery features. In the new version, Mercury added dashboards that display conditions such as service availability and services changes; RSS support for distributing alerts; and taxonomy management features for categorizing services based on business and technical requirements.