Grand Central Communications Inc., a San Francisco-based Web services infrastructure provider, announced today that it has enhanced its network-based service to enable its customers to more quickly add security, reliability and monitoring to Web services deployments.
According to Grand Central, the enhancements are designed to leverage WSDL (Web Services Description Language) to transparently provide advanced integration capabilities when using any of the major Web services development platforms, including those from BEA, IBM, and Microsoft.
New functions available in the April 2002 Service Update include the following:
- WSDL-Messaging: WSDL-Messaging provides capabilities for integrating the extended enterprise transparently, across languages and platforms that support WSDL. By freeing enterprises and their partners from having to learn development techniques or use proprietary software, access to sophisticated integration solutions is made easier.
- Enhanced Verisign Security: Customers now have access to the latest digital certificate technology, recently released from Verisign (see VeriSign Targets Web Services with New Framework), which ensure the highest degree of authentication and encryption in securing their integration and Web services deployments.
- Exception Alerts: Designed to help enterprises manage their on-going inter-enterprise integrations, exception alerts allow parties to be notified of errors and problems in their business processes, providing resolution of issues. With this new feature, all parties involved in a shared business process can have visibility into its status from a single location.
“Our mission is to make integrating with partners as easy as plugging a phone into a phone jack,” said Craig Donato, president and CEO of Grand Central. “With our latest release, we continue to drive the cost and complexity of integrating with partners dramatically downward. We provide our customers with a simple yet comprehensive solution to tackle the most sophisticated integration challenges — including those that would not normally be addressed due to the high cost and complexity associated with traditional integration technologies.”
For ASPs, Grand Central outsourced solution eliminates the need to build a custom API integration tool kit. The application-to-application transactions are moved outside of the corporate firewall onto the shared Grand Central infrastructure. An ASP hooks up to its network once and can connect with all of its customers, provided they are also Grand Central customers.
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