With age comes WSDM

By John Hogan, SearchWebServices.com News Editor 08 Dec 2003 | SearchWebServices.com

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Computer Associates International Inc. said today that it has begun shipping a new component for its Unicenter systems management platform that will manage and monitor enterprise Web services.

Islandia, N.Y.-based CA also announced a series of software partnerships related to the Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) product line and introduced a key beta customer for it.

Details of WSDM were released this summer, shortly after CA announced the acquisition of Boston-based startup Adjoin Solutions Inc., whose Web services security and monitoring technology formed the basis for the product.

"To do the appropriate Web services management, you really need to manage across the whole Web services stack," said Marc Camm, director of business development in CA's office of the CTO. He said that doing so involves management from the infrastructure layer up to the Web services (application) layer.

Camm said that the WSDM product released today can automatically discover, test and monitor Web services so that enterprises can track performance indicators and respond to service interruptions.

'Adaptive threshold management'

Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst with Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC, said that Unicenter WSDM allows enterprises to monitor of the quality of service (QoS) of their Web services automatically. If a predetermined threshold of service performance is exceeded, alerts are generated.

"It is essentially a passive management solution," Bloomberg said. "That is, it monitors and provides what they call adaptive threshold management, which is really the distinguishing feature."

CA's highlight customer for Unicenter WSDM is Microsoft's MapPoint Web Service business unit, which provides XML-based mapping services and driving directions that enterprise customers such as Expedia.com and Starbucks use to connect to other applications.

With about 15 million daily transactions over the Web, Camm said, MapPoint is "probably one of the highest-transaction Web services running on the Internet today."

"They are using Unicenter WSDM to give them granular-level visibility into the overall Web services performance of their different services," he said.

Because MapPoint is owned by Microsoft, it is obviously a .NET shop, but Camm said WSDM can also manage J2EE-based Web services, as well as allow .NET and J2EE services to be managed from a single console.

Partnerships with BEA, Sun and others

Also today, CA announced several partnerships related to its new product. Camm said that, through Unicenter WSDM, CA will provide .NET-based Web services observation technology to application server platform vendors such as BEA Systems Inc., Microsoft, Sun Microsystems Inc., JBoss Group LLC and Systinet Corp.

In addition, Collaxa Inc. will integrate its Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) management technology with WSDM. DataPower Technology Inc.'s Web services security and XML-processing hardware will be integrated with WSDM, as will Mindreef Inc.'s SOAPScope diagnostic tools.

The multitude of partnerships makes sense to Bloomberg.

He said that IBM packs a one-two punch with its WebSphere application server and Tivoli systems management platforms. The combination of CA's Unicenter with BEA's app server is "a great answer to that."

"CA and HP are really the two that are making the biggest moves in this space, and they are going to come to dominate it," Bloomberg said.

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