AmberPoint able to manage sets of SOA services

AmberPoint is upgrading its SOA management platform to accommodate more complex deployments. Focusing on run-time governance, the company on Monday is announcing release 5.0 of AmberPoint, adding the ability to manage sets of services rather than just individual services.

Evolving from the platform’s roots as a Web services management platform, Version 5.0 also can manage assets such as Java Message Service, Enterprise JavaBeans and database traffic. Visibility into JAX-RPC (Java API for XML-based RPC) traffic also is featured.

Through tuning of all aspects of the product, the overall AmberPoint platform operates at five times the speed of its predecessor, according to the company. A new security subsystem is featured as well.

SOA deployments are becoming more complex, according to Ed Horst, AmberPoint vice president of marketing. The company had been accustomed to seeing SOA environments with approximately six Web services in them, but that has changed, he said.

“Now, you’re starting to see dozens or hundreds of Web services,” he said. “It’s just a lot more complex environment that our customers are [managing] at this point.”

Policy management improvements in Version 5.0 allow for policies to be designated for sets of Web services, such as a policy applying to all services that are part of an inventory application. As soon as a service goes into production, policies are applied to it. An encryption policy was noted as an example.

“Instead of having to do these things manually, they happen automatically,” Horst said.

Templates are provided for enterprise-, application-, or industry-specific policies. Release 5.0 offers automatic synchronization with registries and repositories.

The security subsystem in Version 5.0 adds support for the WS-Policy specification and allows for designating factors such as a censorship policy, which determines which type of data cannot be sent outside the user site. AmberPoint 5.0 boosts integration with third-party authentication systems such as Netegrity, Oblix, and Tivoli.

The new version of AmberPoint broadens service management, according to a user of an earlier version of the company’s platform.

“First and foremost, [version 5.0] solves some serious business requirements with regard to Web services and SOA,” said Jorge Mercado, SOA architect at emergency response services provider MedicAlert. “It [provides] a way to manage the deployment your Web services, so that you don’t just have to write a Web service and deploy it to a Web service; you can put it under management, per se, and everything that Web service does, you’ll know about in terms of throughput, response times” and service availability, Mercado said.

AmberPoint is critical to having a firm grip on what a Web service is doing, Mercado added. He also applauded increased integration with identity management systems. MedicAlert’s SOA features a service exposed to the Internet that allows for clients to retrieve and update personal health information, with the rest of the deployment primarily for internal Web services.

Competing with companies such as SOA Systems, Infravio, and Actional, AmberPoint believes its service level and exception management capabilities provide an advantage over rivals. AmberPoint is not intimidated by long-established system management platforms such as Hewlett-Packard’s HP OpenView or Computer Associates’ Unicenter.

“In competitive situations, I don’t think there’s ever a case where we’ve ever lost to any of those guys,” meaning HP and CA, said Horst.

In existence since 2002, AmberPoint has about 86 customers. Horst acknowledges that other vendors have pondered AmberPoint as a potential acquisition target, but the company wishes to remain independent.

“We’re not trying to get bought. We always talk to people about OEM relationships and that’s what we end up doing,” Horst said. He cited a deal with Microsoft as an example.

AmberPoint 5.0 ships later this year. Prices will start at $70,000.