BMC Strikes Deal to Web Services-Enable Its Products

According to the multiyear agreement, BMC will use Systinet's Web Applications and Services Platform to Web services-enable its products.

Systinet Corp. struck a deal Tuesday with BMC Software Inc., whereby BMC has delivered its first product using Systinets Web Applications and Services Platform (WASP) and is working on another, the companies said.

Under the agreement, Houston-based BMC licensed Cambridge, Mass.-based Systinets WASP to Web services-enable its products. The first BMC product to be Web services-enabled using WASP is the BMC Impact Integration Developers Kit, a new kit for building integration solutions for BMCs Service Impact Manager (SIM) environment, said Luigi Suardi, manager for research and development at BMC. BMC delivers systems management, application management, database management and service management solutions. The companys SIM technology is a service management solution that provides real-time service impact management and business relevance information to enterprises, Suardi said.

The new tool aggregates data from components and then calculates impact to services, Suardi said.

"We started in the beginning of 2003 looking at Web services for our own internal needs of exposing BMC products using Web services," Suardi said.

Suardi said BMC looked at other solutions to Web services-enable the companys products but chose Systinet because of three reasons: support for heterogeneous platforms; performance; and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI).

The multiyear deal enables BMC to use Systinets Java, C/C++ and UDDI technology in BMC products. Suardi said another Web services-enabled product is in the works, based on the companys Patrol systems management technology.

"As we increase the number of services were exposing were planning to make them UDDI-aware … so the services will be able to register themselves," Suardi said.

Systinets WASP suite of products is a complete solution for building, deploying, securing and managing Web services. Systinets WASP Server for Java and WASP Server for C++ are industrial-strength Web services run-time environments that support standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1, SOAP 1.2 and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1. WASP UDDI is a UDDI Version 2-compliant registry with advanced UDDI Version 3 functionality.

"Were excited to see Web services move into real mission-critical uses within the enterprise," said Wendell Lansford, chief operating officer at Systinet. "The overall target for us working with large ISVs [independent software vendors] is to target the enterprise. We want to make it easier for them to make products more integratable."

"Were seeing that Systinet is gaining some significant traction with both end users and vendors in that they, like a handful of others focused Web services and SOA [service-oriented architecture] vendors, are providing focused solutions that help companies realize the benefits of Web services and SOA without having to make significant infrastructure investments that they might have to with some of the more established vendors in the marketplace," said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, of Waltham, Mass. "This deal is very much a win-win for both parties as it increases both of their capabilities to reach new customers with emerging Web services and SOA solutions. For Systinet this deal means quite a bit in that their visibility with end users and with some of the more competitive systems management vendors will be significantly increased. For BMC, the Systinet offering plugs a number of gaps with respect to their Web services and SOA offerings. BMC is seeing that their primary competitors in the systems and application management arena are starting to bolster up their Web services and SOA solutions, and for sure BMC needs to respond in kind."

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