Specifically, SOA is expanding the capabilities the management agents that it deploys to the BEA service bus. Previously, the agent could enforce policies that are exposed on the ESB. The new version adds the ability to discover policies that the bus will subsequently consume.
What that means is when you have a service that has some very complex routings, the bus would not normally be aware of what policies will be enforced on the service downstream.
For instance, if the BEA service bus routes a service that uses SAML for federated identity to a Microsoft .NET environment that only accepts WS-Federation, the SOA management agent will now be able to discover that.
It does so, not by situating anything on the Microsoft portion of the environment, but instead, through rules stating that any service routed to that environment will require WS-Federation instead. In effect, the SOA agent anticipates policies that will be enforced downstream based on preset rules.
The new capability patches yet another management hole that is likely to crop up as organizations begin managing services in heterogeneous environments or with business partners.
