Partnership follows merger between rivals Web services and SOA management vendor AmberPoint is teaming with Iona to provide deep integration between the Iona Artix ESB (enterprise service bus) and the AmberPoint SOA Management System, enabling a more granular linkage and policy-based management.The arrangement follows the January acquisition of rival Web services management vendor Actional by Progress Software, which owns the Sonic ESB platform.The integration, set to appear in AmberPoint and Iona offerings in the July time frame, gives enterprises policy-based control over service level management, exception management, security, logging and auditing in Artix environments, the companies said. AmberPoint agent technology will be used in a plug-in providing out-of-the-box integration between Artix and AmberPoint. “This will give the opportunity for customers to not only monitor the activities between AmberPoint and the Artix end points, but also to monitor the inner workings, the activities within the Artix end points,” said Pat Walsh, Iona director of product marketing.These activities include functions within the ESB itself, enabling monitoring of service-level agreements, quality of service, and exception-detection handling, said Ed Horst, AmberPoint director of marketing. If the system is not functioning as expected, AmberPoint can trigger corrective action, Horst said.The Iona-AmberPoint partnership comes just a few months after the Actional merger with Progress Software, which is the parent company of rival ESB vendor Sonic Software. But AmberPoint and Iona executives said their arrangement had been in the works prior to the merger. Iona had looked at such a partnership with Actional but selected AmberPoint, Walsh said.“We did our due diligence and we selected AmberPoint,” he said.Horst would not comment on whether AmberPoint has any plans for similar partnerships with other ESB vendors. Software Development