AmberPoint, Systinet partner to provide discovery, management capabilities Web services software vendors AmberPoint and Systinet are now selling an integrated suite of software for service-oriented architectures, featuring products from both companies.The SOA Starter Pack is intended to provide discovery and management capabilities for SOAs. It features the AmberPoint Management Foundation as well as Systinet Registry along with support and onsite training services. AmberPoint Management Foundation provides a policy-based approach for services management, tracking, and security capabilities. It features versioning, lifecycle management, security enforcement, and service brokering. Systinet Registry is a UDDI-supportive directory for publishing, discovering, and reusing services. Both companies will sell the package, priced at $25,000. “It’s a single contract, it’s a single set of paperwork, it’s a single price, and [it’s] available from both companies,” said Ed Horst, vice president of marketing at AmberPoint. The offering will provide new capabilities including automatic provisioning management, detection and publishing of service information, and sharing of service information and metadata. An integration service and a software integration module also will be featured.Benefits of the offering, according to the companies, include faster time to ROI for SOA projects; best practices for use of SOA and Web services; proficiency with UDDI and management technologies; facilities reuse; and, providing for evolution of services over time.“We are starting to see that end-users are establishing the ways in which they purchase Web services and SOA technology — they realize they need run-time infrastructure as well as management, security, and meta data management and repository capabilities,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an e-mail response to questions. “From what we heard, Systinet and AmberPoint were increasingly seeing each other in their customer implementations, so it was just a matter of time before they got together and put together a unified product for their mutual customers.” Schmelzer explained that through the partnership the companies will be bundling each other’s solutions and selling the joint package to their customers.“This allows them to provide a complete Web services management/repository solution without having the customer buy, configure, or install them separately. This makes a lot of sense and strengthens each of the company’s positions in the market,” Schmelzer said.Systinet and AmberPoint are also working together on a standards effort involving Web services metric and manageability provider information for UDDI. The companies plan to submit to OASIS a technical note entitled, “Representing Web services metric and manageability provider information in UDDI.” The effort is intended to enable information about services to be stored within a UDDI registry, including mapping of Web Services Distributed Management information into a UDDI directory. Seeking to provide for one central location for all data pertaining to a particular business service, AmberPoint and Systinet expect the end result of the proposal would be Web services management vendors having a specification to allow information flows into a registry, connecting both WSDM and UDDI. Support is expected in 2005. Software Development