Startups push services-oriented architectures

Eager to carve out fine-grained niches, Web services startups are rapidly developing tools for constructing services-oriented architectures.

This week, Blue Titan and Swingtide separately will unveil new Web services architectures. The moves represent a push by Web services companies to establish a set of technologies independent from application and network infrastructures, and systems management domains.

“The way we exist is by not being too much of any one of those [categories] so that we [won’t] be easily crushed,” said Sam Boonin, vice president of marketing at Blue Titan in San Francisco.

On Monday, Blue Titan will announce Network Director 2.0, a platform that resides on BEA Systems’ WebLogic and offers a unified control layer for providing Web service interactions with security, reliability, and management.

Network Director 2.0 is designed to enforce application performance policies through a set of services. This includes Fabric Services, designed to expose every function in Network Director as a reusable Web service. Other features include Active Event Messaging, Adaptive Policy Execution, SOAP Stack Interoperability, and support for emerging standards including WS-Security, WS-Policy and WS-Reliable Messaging, the company said.

“We’ve applied the principles of virtualization to Web service-based resources,” explained Blue Titan Chairman and CTO Frank Martinez.”A policy is assigned to or loosely coupled in the actual service itself. But the thing that it’s assigned to is a logical representation. It’s not actually the physical service. That delivers an incredible degree of agility in customer environments.”

Martinez argues that the volume of Web services traffic running through early adopter enterprises is already at a point where control and manageability is a concern.

Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at Web services research company ZapThink, inWaltham, Mass., agrees: “The quantity of XML traffic on the network is exploding. XML itself is verbose.”

As a result, the current generation of systems management tools is generally incapable of effectively managing XML traffic, Bloomberg said. As an example, XML traffic can be invisible to the network. Unauthorized SOAP requests or arbitrary method calls routed through port 80 can bypass firewall defenses.

That type of scenario is an opportunity for Portsmouth, N.H.-based Swingtide, which is carving out a niche with Web services visualization and monitoring tools initially targeted at the financial industry.

On Monday, the company will launch Swingtide Monitor and Swingtide Scorecard, which together give enterprises the ability to view and analyze data. Company executives pitch the products as complementary to Web services management offerings.

According to Jack Serfass, chairman and co-founder of Swingtide, booming XML traffic is shifting demand from monitoring SOAP headers to understanding what’s in the payload. “The interesting thing about XML is, for the first time, the information flowing over the wire is real business information,” he said.

Swingtide Monitor is designed to observe network traffic and extract business information, such as a partner’s application performance, Serfass said. Swingtide Scorecard is built as a collaboration tool to aid developers, combining built-in XML, Java, and .Net domain knowledge with discussion thread, e-mail alerts, and the capability of tagging components of a company’s knowledge base.

“With [services-oriented architecture] networks, the design time and the run time becomes much more closely linked than before,” he said, noting that services-oriented architectures are subject to frequent change.

Brent Sleeper, a principal at The Stencil Group in San Francisco, said Swingtide’s and Blue Titan’s products represent a maturation of Web services implementations. “The first generation were kludges of Web services onto an older architecture,” he said.

While Swingtide is focused on monitoring, Sleeper said companies like Blue Titan and Sonic Software offer a network-centric approach that extends the capabilities of services-oriented architectures.

“Abstracting the network control layer in the services environment seems to be a theme that I’m hearing about from a lot of companies,” Sleeper said.