Web Services in Action? These Vendors Are.

Emboldened by the allure of rich revenues in Web services software, several
vendors this week announced products and partnerships concerning distributed
computing.

With an eye toward securing application-to-application communication across
remote networks, Digital Evolution released a virtual private network (VPN)
appliance that ensures the delivery secure, XML-based Web services between
business partners.

Because Web services rely on the largely insecure Internet for
transportation, customers are loathe to implement the new architectures,
fearing their data may be compromised.

Digital Evolution, which acquired security technology when it bought
Flamenco Networks, is looking to help clients minimize risk and automate Web
services provisioning.

In other safeguarding matters, AmberPoint said at the Gartner Application
Integration and Web services Summit in Orlando that it has integrated
security software from Reactivity. AmberPoint software now provides clients
with security between the network edge and the application server, ensuring
that no one within the company gains unauthorized access to Web services.

Also, at the Gartner Summit in Orlando this week, Actional released SOA
Command and Control Platform, the first product from the Mountain View,
Calif., company since its merger
with Westbridge Technology last month.

The new release, which will be available later this week, combines the
service-oriented architecture and Web services management
tools from Actional with Westbridge’s security technology. The software
helps clients secure, execute and manage Web services and SOAs.

Sandra Rogers, program director of SOA and Web services for IDC, said in a
statement the offering should make it easier for customers to set up an SOA,
driving down total cost of ownership.

Writing Web services infrastructure software for customers makes sense. According to IDC, the Web services software space will reach $3.2 billion by 2008.

As a broader model for distributed computing, SOAs have been gaining steam,
riding the coattails of XML and Web services, both of which have become the
de facto standards for exposing and consuming information among
disparate parties.

To that end, Systinet released its latest UDDI registry,
Business Services Registry 5.5, which the Cambridge, Mass., company said is
the centerpiece of its foundation for application lifecycle management
within the SOA.

The UDDI allows companies to address the governance challenges that arise as
the SOA sews together disconnected departments and functions.

Waltham, Mass., neighbor Cape Clear Tuesday issued the beta release of a new
Business Process Management (BPM) product designed to simplify the execution
of SOAs.

Cape Clear Orchestrator, which will be included in the next release of the
company’s enterprise service bus offers a Business
Process Execution Language (BPEL) runtime and graphical design
and management tools.

Cape Clear claimed in a statement that while typical BPM practices have
failed because they were based on proprietary technology Orchestrator is
based on the BPEL 1.1 standard so that users have one familiar environment
to use.

San Francisco’s Blue Titan meanwhile released Network Director RM, SOA
software that includes standards-based reliable messaging. Network Director
RM is now a messaging backbone, which eliminates the need to pad SOA with a
proprietary messaging solution.

In related news, OASIS has ratified WS-Reliability as a standard for
providing a method to guarantee message delivery over the Internet.

HP , Hitachi , NEC , Novell , Oracle, SeeBeyond , Sun Microsystems and others lent their
technical talents to produce the schema for guaranteed message delivery
using Web services.