It raises the bar for commercial products, because vendors have to offer value on top of what open-source solutions can give you.

The insurance industry can benefit significantly from a comprehensive library of software resources. A service-oriented approach to providing access to library components is a flexible, cost-effective way to help organizations determine which components they may require to better manage their business.

Kenai's policy definition is like peanut butter to Forum's policy enforcement chocolate. Also, they shared investors, so the synergies made sense to them as a single company.

Policy management is really the key. Companies need to figure out their policies from a business perspective, and then communicating and managing those is the technology challenge. If you don't create this governance, then you have chaos. If you don't have a framework for coordinating services, there is no way to get the benefits of reuse.

From the point of view of Progress/Sonic, adding the SOA management capabilities rounds out the Sonic ESB product into a suite that more completely addresses the infrastructure requirements of SOA.

Needless to say, this isn't how companies do business -- there's always a human element to establishing a relationship. As a result, the UBR served as little more than an interoperability reference implementation. Now that UDDI has become more of a metadata management standard for SOA, there's little need for the UBR anymore.