HP Acquires TruLogica to Build Up Infrastructure Strategy

The concept, however, is still in the beginning stages, with between 5 percent and 10 percent of large enterprises testing various technologies, according to market researcher ZapThink LLC.

“A lot of these announcements that HP is making are still well in advance of what customers will actually be using,” ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said. “This is a long-term strategy for HP in building their adaptive enterprise technology.”

Read more at: TechWeb

Web services security vendors focus on access control, XML firewalls

That hasn’t changed much, as customers wait for vendors to finalize standards such as XML Key Management Specification (XKMS is for managing the keys needed to encrypt and decrypt Web services messages), says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink, an analysis and consulting firm in Waltham, Mass.

Single-point authentication and access control are important because Web services can’t make users more efficient if those users have to enter a new user ID and password each time their request hits another application. “Larger entities might have [10,000, 20,000] or 30,000 users,” says Bloomberg, each of whom might have different access rights on dozens of different systems — access rights that need to be changed, or even withdrawn, as the employee’s responsibilities change or they leave the company.

Major vendors such as Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. are building Web services security into their broader product platforms. Sun “has leadership in the directory space with their Directory Server,” says Bloomberg, which is the foundation for the Sun ONE Identity Server. Microsoft has also announced plans for a technology code-named “TrustBridge,” which would allow secure authentication of users, and sharing of their user identities across business and security boundaries.

Read more at: SearchWin2000

Overview of Web Services Management

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Overview of Web Services Security

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SOA Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best pra

SOA Tools and Best Practices

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best practices as well as an analysis of the tools that are currently available for building Service-oriented architectures.

SOA Tools

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best pra

W3C Proposes XML Encryption, Decryption Specs

“Web Services offer great potential for business-to-business communication and integration,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. “But the lack of robust security and management solutions currently inhibit the ability for companies to conduct business with each other via Web Services over the Internet. You can’t just buy a little security. You have to cover all the bases to be secure.”

Bloomberg told internetnews.com the XML Encryption standard is one of the “lynchpins of XML and Web Services security.”

Read more at: Internetnews.com

Web services management market expected to grow

A recent report entitled “Service-Oriented Management: How Web Services are the Key to the Service-Oriented Architecture” published by ZapThink indicates the potential for significant growth in the Web services management market. The company predicts that the market will increase from $30 million in 2002 to $9.2 billion by 2007.

Read more at: Transact

Service-Oriented Management

Web Services management applications provide software that helps companies manage the systems and applications that underlie their Web Services implementations. The Web Services management products on the market today offer functionality in five basic categories: system management, lifecycle management, business management, security management, and the most important, Service-Oriented Architecture enablement.

The latter category is especially important because many Web Services management products provide the critical infrastructure necessary for companies to take their fine-grained, atomic Web Services and other data sources and encapsulate and compose them into coarse-grained business Services that make up a Service-Oriented Architecture. Such architectures offer far more long-term business value than the point-to-point applications of Web Services common today.