Blue Titan orchestrates Web services

The label “Web services management,” which gained currency a couple of years ago, never did justice to the ambitions of the key players in the field. For Frank Martinez, Blue Titan’s chairman and CTO, the goal was and is to support “SOA [service-oriented architecture] in the large.” How large? Martinez says, “We’re talking hundreds of endpoints, hundreds to many hundreds of contracts, tens of millions of messages over the wire, and a new class of process-centric composite applications.”

To support these scenarios, Blue Titan’s Network Director implements an overlay network made of SOAP routers — a Web services “fabric.” SOAP intermediation is becoming the standard way to monitor service-level agreements, enforce security policies, balance loads, and guarantee availability in Web services networks. But Martinez has a unique view of what can be done with the metadata that’s visible to the SOAP router. “When our fabric is deployed,” he says, “we see the emergence of subnets that are logically segmented by business process, by application, by geography, or some combination of those.”

You can scale up by adding memory, CPUs, and load-balancers to the SOAP routers. But scaling isn’t just about the amount of traffic you’re pushing through, Martinez says. “It’s about how fast you enable new composite applications, new orchestrations of Web services. That’s scaling with a capital S.”

Suppose, for example, that the North American division of a company uses Web services interfaces to Ariba and Concur for purchasing and expenses, whereas the European division uses another set of services for the same functions. How do you deploy a single shared application that works in both cases? Blue Titan’s logically partitioned fabric handles this scenario, Martinez says. A North American user is dynamically routed to Ariba and Concur, a European user to local equivalents.

What Network Director currently does for SOA control infrastructure, Martinez says, a forthcoming product will do for metadata-driven information management. As more applications converse using SOAP messages, which are transparent to authorized intermediaries, it starts to become possible to satisfy the voracious appetite of every business for real-time status and events. In the financial realm, detection of fraud and money laundering will be among the first applications to benefit. Such problems were previously unresolvable for reasons that weren’t just technological. “A lot of it is organizational too,” Martinez concludes. “As human beings, we do not share well.” He’s bet his company on a model of enterprise architecture that doesn’t require us to.