LAS VEGAS—Computer Associates International Inc. Monday launched its latest foray into Web services management with a new tool designed to manage the services themselves—as opposed to the infrastructure that delivers them.
The new Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) tool can automatically discover Web services as they are added to an enterprises network, catalog the service and continuously track different Web services operations through predefined monitors. One such monitor, for example, could track Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages.
WSDM, which joins a handful of tools from smaller startups such as Amberpoint in providing insight into the performance of Web services, works with any Web service based on the industry-standard Web Services Description Language, according to Dmitri Tcherevik, vice president and director of Web services at CA.
Tcherevik said CA is the first major enterprise systems management provider to offer a Web services management tool.
Unicenter WSDM gathers information about the services and their performance, and then analyzes the data. In the event of a problem, it can take corrective action or notify an administrator to take action.
Tcherevik said the tool is easy to configure and imposes little extra overhead.
Unicenter WSDM, in beta release now, is due out by years end. Pricing for it has not yet been set.
CA also enhanced its existing Web services infrastructure management tools with new releases of its Unicenter Management for WebSphere and Unicenter Management for WebLogic. Both updates can now discover Java Beans as well as monitor Web services transactions in real time and synthetically.
In addition, CA enhanced Unicenter Management for .NET Framework. It can discover Web services, provide service-level reporting as well as performance and availability reporting, and send alerts about problems.
Also, CA enhanced its eTrust Directory with what officials claim is the first UDDI implementation that can be deployed on a large scale.