Computer Associates on Monday released its Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management system. It manages Web services natively at the service level by monitoring Simple Object Access Protocol messages.Computer Associates International Inc. on Monday released its new Web-services-management solution, the Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management. The system was launched into beta during the summer.
Dmitri Tcherevik, vice president of Web services at Islandia, N.Y.-based Computer Associates, said the company is responding to demand from its customers for a Web services management solution.
"The focus is shifting from the development of Web services to the deployment, and once deployed the issue of management is becoming very apparent and were experiencing a significant pull from our customers," Tcherevik said.
Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) manages Web services natively at the service level by monitoring Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages, he said.
In addition, Computer Associates is introducing an end-to-end management platform for Web services based on WSDM that includes a scalable Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) server.
Moreover, Computer Associates has enlisted several partners to support WSDM, including DataPower Technology Inc., Mindreef Inc., Collaxa Inc., JBoss Group LLC, Systinet Corp. Tcherevik said the company is working with industry leaders such as BEA Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Sun Microsystems Inc. to provide native support for those platforms.
For example, DataPower is integrating its XS40 XML security gateway with Computer Associates Unicenter WSDM to bolster performance, security, reliability and integrity, the companies said.
"The combination of DataPowers XML-aware networking devices and CAs Unicenter WSDM represents a key technological advancement and offers mutual customers the management capabilities to cope with the enormous complexity of Web services that are widely distributed across enterprise environments," said Eugene Kuznetsov, chairman and chief technology officer at Cambridge, Mass.-based DataPower, in a statement.
Meanwhile, Hollis, N.H.-based Mindreef is integrating its SOAPscope Web services diagnostics system with Unicenter WSDM, said Mark Ericson, CTO at Mindreef. The combination of the two technologies will enable developers to drill down to seek out root causes of any Web services problems. SOAPscope enables users to view the content of their SOAP messages and to detect and resolve interoperability issues, Mindreef said.
Systinet will provide a Unicenter WSDM compliant observer plug-in for its Web Applications and Services Platform (WASP) to ensure manageability of WASP-based applications to customers using Computer Associates management solutions, the Cambridge, Mass., company said.
Collaxa, of Redwood Shores, Calif., is integrating its products with Unicenter WSDM to provide discovery, management and other functions of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes.
Unicenter WSDM provides native support for .Net and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platforms, Tcherevik said.
JBoss, which provides services around its open source J2EE application server, worked with Computer Associates to support Unicenter WSDM native observation on JBoss application server, officials at the Atlanta-based company said.
"CA is the first among the large management tools vendors to announce a Web services management solution," Tcherevik said. "There are a few startups with a similar approach, but they cannot provide the depth of management we can with integration to our portfolio of management technology."
"What makes the CA story unique is that its not just about Web services management by itself, but rather in the context of managing all the enterprises IT assets," said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, Cambridge, Mass.
"Basically, CA sees their role as managing the entire IT infrastructure from the hardware and systems to the application servers that run on top of those systems to the services that run on top of the app servers...and beyond. As a result, their CA WSDM story helps to further complement and complete their overall management story by adding robust Web services management capabilities—that were gained through the acquisition of Adjoin earlier in the year," Schmelzer said.
To read more about Computer Associates Adjoin acquisition and Web services management, click here.
Despite Tchereviks claims regarding startups, Schmelzer said companies such as Amberpoint Inc. and Actional Corp. will be able "to innovate what Web services and service-oriented management means, and because of their size and nimbleness, they will always stay a step or two ahead of folks like CA."
"However, their [the startups] story is different. While CAs management story is all about the breadth of management and management at all the tiers of the IT infrastructure, the emerging Web-services-management startups are focused on evolving the set of capabilities and functions that are required of the service-oriented-management category. That being said, these startup vendors will look increasingly attractive as acquisition candidates as the market continues to become ferociously competitive for management solutions."
Meanwhile, Computer Associates also is leading an effort to finalize a Web Services Distributed Management standard through the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).
In addition, Tcherevik said MapPoint, the Microsoft-sponsored mapping and location Web service will use Computer Associates WSDM to manage and gain visibility into the millions of Web-service transactions the service processes daily.
Web Services, Web 2.0 & SOA 
