Talk about winning by a nose.

Digital Evolution Service Manager v2.3.2, released in May, won our Gold Award by a single point. Our judges gave Service Manager v2.3.2 the edge in performance and value over Actional 5.1 from Actional Corp.

Service Manager combines Web services management and security in one package that includes centralized subsystems that act as a policy definition point, the company said. The subsystems include Digital Evolution's Policy Manager, Registry, Alert Manager, and Console products.

Digital Evolution positions its product as one that delivers high throughput for fast response times, Service Manager is also stateless, allowing for high availability, scaling and load balancing.

Our judges agreed, giving it the highest marks possible in performance, functionality and value.

Web services security and management are two of the three launching points for any Web services deployment. Enterprise affections for Web services and service-oriented architecture are at an all-time high, and managing multiple services is paramount if companies are to keep a handle on their architectures.

Service Manager v2.3.2 costs $5,000 per CPU.

Michael S. Mimoso