Blue Titan Web Services App Targets Networking Features

Blue Titan Software Inc. is rolling out software designed to add a networking layer to Web services, where applications and data can be shared and combined.

Officials with the San Francisco company, which released two versions of its new Web services software last week, said the Web services networking arena encompasses network infrastructure; applications and integration infrastructure; and application, systems and network management. The software provides networking capabilities that IT organizations require, according to Blue Titan co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Frank Martinez.

The softwares two versions are Blue Titan Network Director and Blue Titan Server Suite. Network Director builds a "virtualization layer" between applications that consume Web services and the systems that are exposed as Web services, Martinez said. This virtualization layer provides provisioning, security, access control, queuing, performance management and visibility for communication between applications.

Server Suite helps users manage Web services. Users can use this suite as a stand-alone deployment and management solution for application developers, according to the company.

Martinez said Web services require "application-level networking solutions" of the type that Blue Titan delivers. The "origin-to-edge" concept touted by the company is based on a message-oriented model, Martinez said. The Blue Titan software enables users to keep functions such as transactions at the edge of the network.

The products provide basic security elements out of the box but allow users to implement their own security models, Martinez said.

"Security is a pluggable problem," Martinez said. "So we approach it by providing a pluggable model for security."

Albert Prast, CTO of RoTech Medical Corp. and an early Blue Titan user, said the Orlando, Fla., medical services company expects eventually to save $6.5 million in WAN infrastructure costs by using Blue Titan.

RoTech is building a Web services-oriented architecture to support its business, and Blue Titan is a key part of that. RoTech has more than 50 Web services-oriented applications, Prast said, adding that the entire business runs on a Web services architecture.

"The [Blue Titan] technology is affordable, scalable and extremely reliable, in addition to being easy to use," Prast said. "For our purposes, it runs well on Linux and has built-in connectors to popular open-source databases, as well as providing us connectivity to our proprietary back end.

"In the past, we used to build applications one at a time," Prast said. "Using Web services, we are able to package deliverables—for simplicity, think data—once and deliver it many places customized to the needs of each individual end user."