In the winter of 2007, SearchSOA.com invited companies in the SOA space and related markets to nominate their products for the 2007 Products of the Year awards. We also solicited nominations through the SearchSOA.com website and through email newsletters to our readers. To be eligible for consideration, a product had to have been introduced or significantly upgraded between Dec. 1, 2006 and Nov. 30, 2007. For previously available products, the upgrade must have incorporated major new features that were designed to meet new or evolving needs in the marketplace. Not all companies we invited to participate ultimately submitted nominations.

We looked at products in eight categories: Service design and modeling, Service assembly and integration, Service performance, Service management/monitoring, Data services/integration, SOA security, SOA governance, Composite application assembly. Each category had its own set of judges, who rated the products based on a variety of criteria including innovation, performance, ease of integration into environment, ease of use, manageability, functionality, value and the ability of the product to enable service orientation. We then tallied the judges' ratings separately and aggregated them with those of the other judges to come up with a single numerical score.