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Two Web services management software suppliers announced new products last week, approaching the issue of managing Web services from two perspectives.
Both Swingtide Inc., of Portsmouth, N.H., and Blue Titan Software Inc., of San Francisco, unveiled new Web services management solutions, with Swingtide offering a more passive solution and Blue Titan delivering a more active product.
Swingtide made its announcement at the annual Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development conference in Orlando, Fla. The company announced two products, Swingtide Monitor and Swingtide Scorecard, which enable users to view, analyze and manage the data they send via ACORD, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or XML standards, officials said. Swingtide Monitor tracks the growth and business usage of Web services and XML networks and not the performance of the physical network. Swingtide Scorecard is a methodology for improving return on investment from XML-based Web services.
Swingtide officials said the products can be tailored to industry needs. The first industry supported is insurance, for which Swingtide has incorporated complete ACORD standards into the products. Future support will be added for banking and securities trading.
Meanwhile, Blue Titan announced the release of Network Director 2.0, its Web services management solution that delivers event-driven control for service-oriented architectures (see review).
New capabilities in Network Director 2.0 include fabric services, which expose functions as Web services; active event messaging; adaptive policy execution; SOAP stack interoperability; and support for emerging standards such as Web Services-Security, Web Services-Policy and Web Services-ReliableMessaging.
Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, in Cambridge, Mass., said he views Swingtide as unique in its category.
“Instead of rushing the first version of their software product to market, they developed an extensive professional services offering to build relationships with their customers, build awareness within their selected target industry and to gather a detailed understanding of their customers needs,” Bloomberg said.
“By passive, we mean that it monitors XML activity without affecting it and provides visibility into the XML on a companys network,” he said. “In contrast, Blue Titan has an active management approach that controls the traffic, ensuring reliability and actively managing security policies.”