Long before MOM became an acronym for Microsoft's Operations Manager, it was a generic term applied to a vendor-agnostic group of enterprise management products. In this capacity, the acronym stands for Manager of Managers, and describes an architecture exemplified by CA's Aprisma. Aprisma's MoM event console is an approach to scaling and managing multiple distributed instances of Aprisma. The tiered design minimizes SNMP traffic across the WAN while providing a single enterprise view of the infrastructure environment. What would happen if this same design was applied to the problem of integrating multiple information stores into a federated CMDB consolidation product?

In a recent article, I discussed software-oriented architecture's loose coupling and the fact that it is likely one more reason why a federated CMDB will become increasingly fundamental to managing SOA and Web services. That article described a federated CMDB as providing the "missing link" for automating the process of mapping virtualized business services to underlying technology. Especially as more enterprises roll out Web services-based SOAs, an alternative to today's manual mapping techniques will become vital to managing these loosely coupled systems.

WebMethods' recent acquisitions demonstrate that powerful information repositories are part of vendor product strategies as well. On Sept. 11, just weeks after announcing its acquisition of Cerebra, webMethods announced the purchase of Infravio. The close proximity of these two buys isn't a coincidence. WebMethods' simultaneous courtship and acquisition of both companies is an indication of its intent to pursue the SOA big picture, which will likely include extensive external and cross-industry integrations.

Infravio's products address SOA governance and metadata management, while Cerebra addresses taxonomies, or relationships, between organizational assets such as XML schemas and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) documents. The combination of these functionalities will be critical to cross-industry integration. For example, integrating the healthcare industry to the insurance industry isn't a straightforward proposition. Both industries have their own XML schemas, document formats, governance and security requirements. What happens when they are linked in an SOA and have to "talk" electronically? With these acquisitions, webMethods is positioning for just such a scenario.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.