AmberPoint automatically discovers SOA components, as well as the interdependencies between components. It gives IT and Operations teams a unique vantage point into the SOA network and its live relationships, and enables architects and managers to ensure that only approved components are deployed. AmberPoint automatically posts metadata on discovered services to any registry or repository to ensure that design-time governance reflects the running reality of the production system.

It employs Ajax technology to create a rich user interface for service monitoring and drill-downs. A comprehensive policy-templating mechanism and an automatic policy provisioning system minimize the time and skill required to set and maintain policies end-to-end across an SOA landscape. AmberPoint offers an extensive and customizable library of policies, and automatically provisions policies based on service profiles.

"Amberpoint's a bit of a venerable player in SOA circles," one judge wrote. "It's been around since the early days and you'll find a lot of early SOA adopters using it. Many of the users now pursuing SOA might not be as familiar with it or with what Web services management software does, but it delivers critical endpoint capabilities that you need for staying on top of a distributed architecture."

Judges gave AmberPoint high marks for ease of integration. "It works with pretty much everything else out there," according to one panel member. Performance was another area where it scored well. In particular it helps curtail runaway demand for a given service with a number of throttling capabilities.

Version 6 was released in November 2007 and it uses "agentless' policy enforcement, capable of delegating runtime policy enforcement to ESBs, XML appliances or traditional system management software, effectively decoupling policy enforcement from policy execution.

Pricing starts at $35,000.