SAP has been talking up their suite of SOA tools. The names all run together a bit, since they each contain some permutation of "enterprise" and "builder", but it's a very impressive set of tools.

Everything SAP does comes off of an enterprise service repository (ESR). This includes a UDDI registry, and it supports service discovery and lookup. Development tools allow developers to search and discover services through their "ES Workspace". Interestingly, this workspace is open to partners as well as internal developers.

From the ESR, a developer can import enough of a service defition to build a composite application. Composite applications include business process definitions, new services of their own, local UI components, and remote service references.

Once a developer creates a composite application, it can be deployed to a local container or a test server. Presumably, there's a similar tool available for administrators to deploy services, composite applications, and other enterprise components onto servers.

Through it all, the complete definition of every component goes into the ESR.

In order to make the entire service lifecycle work, SAP has defined a strong meta-model and a very strong governance process.

This is the ultimate expression of the top-down, strong-governance model for enterprise SOA.

If you're into that sort of thing.