Blue Titan Sorts Web Services

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Blue Titan Network Director 2.0

Blue Titan Network Director helps organizations get a handle on Web services by installing components throughout the network and using centrally managed policies to govern the creation, deployment, use and performance of Web services. Blue Titan has a good idea and a good start with a solid product. IT managers who are faced with rolling out Web services will likely control long-term costs by imposing order on services that have the potential to become a chaotic hodgepodge.

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS USABILITY EXCELLENT CAPABILITY GOOD PERFORMANCE GOOD INTEROPERABILITY FAIR MANAGEABILITY GOOD SCALABILITY EXCELLENT SECURITY GOOD

PRO: Clean interface and a clear method for cataloging Web services; effective access controls and good infrastructure for monitoring transaction performance. CON: Needs additional historical reporting and real-time monitoring capabilities; lacks effective integration with other performance monitoring tools.

EVALUATION SHORT LIST • Confluent Softwares Core Manager

Blue Titan Software Inc.s updated network director brings order and management to the jumble of Web services by using a host of software components and consoles loaded on systems throughout the enterprise network.

IT managers who are faced with business operations that rely on Web services should consider Blue Titan Network Director. Blue Titan is one of the few companies fielding a monitoring and management tool designed to track applications that rely on XML messaging.

During tests at eWEEK Labs, we were able to incorporate Web services such as a stock quote system provided by XMethods Inc. and could monitor the service for availability while also getting reports on how much the stock quote application was used.

Blue Titan Network Director Version 2.0 became available last month.

Blue Titan Network Director is composed of at least one Engine and one or more switches (which the company now calls Control Points), Servers and Managers, along with a data repository (which supports only Oracle Corp. databases). Blue Titan Network Director also includes Blue Titan Studio, which we used to register new and existing application logic that uses SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).

The base Blue Titan configuration, which we tested, includes one Manager, an Engine and four Control Points. This configuration costs $150,000, but prices vary widely based on the number of control points and the amount of professional services needed to install the product.

We installed the components on servers running Red Hat Inc.s Red Hat Linux Version 8.0. For now, Blue Titans infrastructure requirements are quite specific, and IT managers must have staff with Linux and Oracle experience to handle the initial installation tasks.

We used Blue Titan Network Director to uniformly make Web services available in our network while also managing and monitoring the performance of these services. Much like other network and application management tools, we could set up Blue Titan Network Director to forward alerts when thresholds were crossed, but in this version only e-mail alerts are supported.