Managing application services quality is becoming a critical IT discipline as companies increase their service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments.

“It’s an ongoing battle, because you have to continue to maintain the connection between the business requirements and what the software actually does, and those requirements always change -- that’s the whole idea,” says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at research firm ZapThink.

Indeed, the idea behind SOA is to build an infrastructure that enables compositions of loosely coupled software services to exchange data or coordinate a business function, for example. Companies are becoming sold on the model, according to industry analysts. By 2010, at least 65% of large organizations will have more than 35% of their application portfolios SOA-based, up from fewer than 5% of organizations in 2005, predicts research firm Gartner.

As SOAs catch on, companies are finding testing isn’t the only IT area that could require a makeover. Designing, deploying and managing services-based applications is a different animal from working with traditional multitier applications. To deal with the changes, management pros are augmenting their tool sets with software that gives a clearer view inside transaction-level details, for example, and network executives are considering appliances that can help tackle XML-processing loads.

There are plenty of vendors on hand to help, including those with SOA testing and validation tools, policy management and enforcement software, and XML processing and security appliances.