Management product is ready to ship Computer Associates on Monday will face off against smaller companies in the Web services management field when it ships its Unicenter WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) product.Although vendors such as Actional and Blue Titan Software have focused on products that manage Web services traffic, CA enters the fray as an established giant in systems management. Its WSDM product can leverage the Unicenter management console or be run separately.“None of the smaller companies have a platform-management story, only CA does,” said Dmitri Tcherevik, vice president of Web services at CA. Unicenter WSDM manages Web services natively at the services level, Tcherevik said. “It gives you visibility and control of Web services. People can measure response time, transaction rate, message size. They can monitor the health of Web services,” he said. Unicenter WSDM features technology gained from CA’s Adjoin Solutions acquisition of last summer.Because of its breadth of management capability, CA is in a different league than other management vendors, said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. But other, smaller vendors are more focused on narrower challenges of managing Web services and SOAs (services-oriented architectures) than Computer Associates is, he added.“As a result, those vendors may be first to innovate the definition of what Web services management means to the enterprise, but CA will definitely be hot on their tails,” Schmelzer said. In addition to rolling out Unicenter WSDM, CA on Monday is launching its overall Web services management solution, which includes Unicenter WSDM and platform-specific Unicenter management tools for BEA Systems’ WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and the new Unicenter Management for .Net Framework, also being announced on Monday.Unicenter WSDM pricing starts at $25,000 per server, with a minimum of two servers required. Software Development