With increasing adoption of SOA and growth of enterprise service portfolios, organizations struggle to provide effective service life-cycle management that scales across the enterprise. A manual process is sufficient to coordinate a handful of teams providing and consuming a relatively static catalog of services, particularly in a pilot setting, but robust processes and automation are necessary to manage a large number of teams using a dynamic and diverse service catalog. The common term for the products in this evaluation is "SOA repositories," but Forrester has chosen to call them SOA service life-cycle management solutions because they provide more than just storage and cataloging of information about individual services -- they also automate the process of service life-cycle management, providing a combination of the following capabilities, each critical to running an effective, scalable service life-cycle management process that supports necessary organizational discipline:

• Sophisticated workflow governing the service life cycle
• Robust electronic notification and approval
• Flexible categorization of services and other assets
• Automated capture of relationships among services and between services and business
• Processes
• Reporting on key metrics to support planning and assessment
• Flexible customization of asset types and life cycles
• Integration with runtime environments
• Introspection of common interface definition artifacts