Actional eases Web services management

AS CEO OF Actional, Frank Bergandi has been instrumental in the development of the company’s Web services management software. InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor talks to Bergandi, who discusses the company’s new SOAPswitch technology, which will permit the speedy implementation of standards-based Web services functionality.

InfoWorld: Can you bring me up to date on the company and its general vision?

InfoWorld: So is that different from the category we used to call legacy integration?

Bergandi: [Legacy integration] is just one of the things that the product does. So if you have a Siebel system and you want to Web service-enable a customer look-up or a customer modification, you could use a portal, use Web services, and then automatically with our product develop those interfaces.

InfoWorld: And how is that accomplished?

Bergandi: With a wizard-based environment within the SOAPswitch. The SOAPswitch itself has self-discovery capabilities. It has the ability to, in the example I gave you, inquire into the metadata of what the Siebel system looks like; discover what business objects are available and what methods are available against those business objects; and then, based upon that, in a very, very simple way, generate all the SOAP that’s required for communication.

InfoWorld: Where do you go from here? Do you start layering in things like business process integration tools or management tools?

Bergandi: I think the real end game here is on the management side. And it exists today in the product, and I think that’s the area that probably will have our attention in terms of developing stronger products in the future. The [management] problem is not going to go away. As a matter of fact, it’s going to get worse. The more people implement Web services, the more there are going to be cross-platform and intracompany and intercompany situations.

InfoWorld: Who’s going to handle the QoS/SLA implications of Web services? Is that something that you enable a partner to deal with or do you do that, in terms of monitoring and enforcing?

Bergandi: Well, we’re going to provide the framework for the monitoring. And I expect, over time, other monitoring tools to either be developed by us or [we will] plug in other monitoring tools into the framework.

InfoWorld: There are four different camps all telling me they’re going to handle Web services management — people who do version control software, people who do content management, people like Tivoli who do network and systems management, and then this new class of startup company. Where does Actional sit in all that and how do you perceive this all coming together?

Bergandi: Well, I guess if I was a betting man I would say it’s probably not the Web content people. I would probably bet on companies like Tivoli and CA, even — well, not so much CA, but certainly Tivoli. You know that class of company [is] giving it a try because they [will] lose their story unless they can morph [into] this. So I would bet on them. But like most other innovations in the world, it’s going to be some new companies [that prevail]. And I think to a degree it’s going to be us, it’s going to be some of our competitors that exist today, and some of our competitors who are yet to even exist.

InfoWorld: Do we ever get to the point where companies like Actional partner with companies like BMC and CA, Tivoli and HP, that link up the two?

Bergandi: I think what’ll happen is, over time, we’ll have — I guess let me just use the word “plug-in” for lack of a better term — a plug-in for OpenView or a plug-in for those different products.

InfoWorld: You have the SOAPswitch, and when I hear the word “switch” my mind goes to that networking model. One of the issues around Web services is performance and latency, and people are talking about using caching of different SOAP implementations to accelerate performance. Is that something I can do inside your framework?

Bergandi: Yes. You know, latency has always been of critical importance to us. We’re not to the point that we can stand up and say that we scale better than others because people aren’t scaling this thing yet. Our architecture is designed for speed, especially taking a clue from the ACB, the Actional Control Broker architecture. It’s a one-step transform. As part of the management tool that exists in the product today, you could take a look, graphically, at how much time a transaction spends in the switch itself. And it’s marginal, minimal.

InfoWorld: What’s your take on what will happen around Web services orchestration standards and how that process will come together?

Bergandi: I think the app server wins. And I think that there’s going to be a lot of orchestration capability for us through VPN capabilities into the app server. That’s clearly not what my former employer would want to believe. He’d want to believe that TIBCO would become the VPN leader and app servers become commoditized.

InfoWorld: And they argue that app servers, in and of themselves, will not scale without some kind of layer sitting on top of them.

Bergandi: I think the app server wins. I think obviously Microsoft and IBM and BEA and, to a lesser degree, Sun [win]. And I think what’ll happen is that there will be multiple standards at a lower level for VPN. And that sort of plays to our strengths, that gives us another opportunity to have a switch product that allows one standard to talk to another standard.

InfoWorld: Is that the place where you can play that thought leadership role? Somewhere between the app server and the business process management layer, there is a requirement for cross-app server infrastructure that you guys can really own?

Bergandi: That’s where we’re going to go. I think that going forward we’re going to continue on our core competencies, which again is the ability [to do] transformation very, very quickly. I think there’s going to be a lot of opportunities where we’re going to see multiple different standards emerge at a lower level. And I think that’s where we’re going to come to grips.

InfoWorld: So looking out a year from now, how will people judge whether your tenure here was successful, what are the benchmarks?

Bergandi: I think the benchmarks, obviously, from a revenue point of view, would be a company that’s doing $30 [million] to $50 million in revenue. From a products positioning point of view, it would be a company whose product is a de facto standard, specifically in that the Web service network management monitoring area will probably have some partnerships with some of the display-type vendors. You know, people who either display that information through a portal or though a management system of their own. And [we would also be] providing some integration services. We sort of skip over that, but I still think that the biggest problem that CIOs have today, at least in a number of surveys I’ve seen, is just how do you integrate what you have?

InfoWorld: What, in the next four months, is going to make Actional break through and get people’s attention in this space?

Bergandi: I think the critical thing is for us to continue to deliver products and continue to get involved in proof of concepts and just get more visibility that way. Nobody’s buying software without a return on investment today. So it’s just a matter for us to go out and find people who are ready to launch a Web services opportunity, who have an existing app that they’re going after that has an ROI tied to it.

InfoWorld: If you can wish for anything you want, except for a turnaround in the economy, what is it?

Bergandi: I would look for clarity [and] a couple of killer apps. [So] that instead of trying to sell a technology, [we could] actually go to the marketplace and say “Here’s actual living proof that Web services is the way to go.”