Oracle Buys Oblix to Secure Web Services

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said Oblix was a solid company because of its ID and Web services management, which it picked up from its acquisition of Confluent Software a year ago. But Oblix never gained on companies like SOA Software and AmberPoint in the Web services management space.

Now Bloomberg is curious if Oracle will use Oblix to flesh out its service-oriented architecture (SOA) (define) line.

“This move by Oracle begs the question: was there something wrong with Oblix’ WSM capabilities, or does Oracle not understand how vital WSM is in an overall SOA product strategy?” Bloomberg said. “The jury is still out on whether Oracle can truly put together a coherent SOA strategy that will be competitive with the likes of IBM, BEA Systems and Microsoft.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Web Services Distributed Management spec approved

An analyst said WSDM would provide for standardization at a time when the market for Web services management is consolidating.

“We’re seeing the ‘big boys’ enter with significant products to market, including IBM, HP, and CA,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink. “As a result, the big initiative is to standardize how these various products can manage the Web services that are running on other people’s platforms, especially on IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun.

“As such, WSDM goes a long way to solve two problems: the use of Web services to manage systems and the ability to manage Web services themselves. What we should expect to see is more consolidation of vendors and products in this space and some agreement on WSDM as the format for solving heterogeneous Web services management issues,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

BMC Grabs ID Management Vendor

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said ID management is a necessary ingredient for a company’s enterprise architecture, making acquisitions a no-brainer. To date, he said the CA/Netegrity deal makes CA the market leader, with BMC playing catch up.

“We expect the gulf between these two to widen, as CA/Netegrity understands the power of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as the dominant form of enterprise architecture moving forward (as does IBM, for that matter), while SOA has largely been off the roadmap for BMC,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: InternetNews

Systinet Q3 Results Show Registry – SOA Momentum

“In the early stages of Web service adoption, Systinet forged a path with its enablement products that are now widely deployed with prominent companies like Amazon.com,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst, ZapThink LLC. “Now, the company is helping to drive SOA adoption, providing a registry solution critical for SOA discovery, governance and lifecycle management.”

Read more at: Systinet Press Release

BMC Strikes Deal to Web Services-Enable Its Products

“We’re seeing that Systinet is gaining some significant traction with both end users and vendors in that they, like a handful of others focused Web services and SOA [service-oriented architecture] vendors, are providing focused solutions that help companies realize the benefits of Web services and SOA without having to make significant infrastructure investments that they might have to with some of the more ‘established’ vendors in the marketplace,” said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, of Waltham, Mass. “This deal is very much a win-win for both parties as it increases both of their capabilities to reach new customers with emerging Web services and SOA solutions. For Systinet this deal means quite a bit in that their visibility with end users and with some of the more competitive systems management vendors will be significantly increased. For BMC, the Systinet offering plugs a number of gaps with respect to their Web services and SOA offerings. BMC is seeing that their primary competitors in the systems and application management arena are starting to bolster up their Web services and SOA solutions, and for sure BMC needs to respond in kind.”

Read more at: eWeek

An Executive Guide to Utility Computing

On-demand computing brings a major shift in the way enterprises think about IT challenges. For the past decade or more, the idea was to integrate–to make disparate software applications work together.With on-demand, IT becomes a set of functions a vailable on the network. “This is an architectural change,” says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at Waltham, Mass., research firm ZapThink. “And software architectures have always been very difficult to understand, let alone change.”

“Today, the CIO is fundamentally thinking about making IT meet the needs of the business,” says ZapThink’s Bloomberg. ” In the past, most IT groups weren’t very good at that.Well, the CIO doesn’t want to be the bad guy anymore. In those C-level meetings, he wants to say, ‘We have a flexible IT organization that can meet the needs of the business and do it with low risk.’

Read more at: Enterprise Leadership (BMC Software Magazine)

CA tackles Web services management

“Web services management also is a key part of the movement toward service-oriented architectures, which is a new approach to organizing an enterprise data center,” says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink. “Connecting Web services to on-demand computing is all part of treating software as components that you can reuse.”

Read more at: Network World

OASIS Stamps Approval on Provisioning Standard

Previously, there was no one way to do this in a uniform manner. With SPML, companies don’t have to waste what could be millions of dollars on development work in order to get people provisioned or deprovisioned, said ZapThink Senior Analyst Ronald Schmelzer.

“What this means for companies is that as they purchase applications that require some sort of user access, they should make sure that they have a standard way of provisioning users on, and deprovisioning users from that application,” Schmelzer told internetnews.com.

“SPML will most likely work within a broader framework for enterprise-wide security infrastructure such as those provided by other standardization initiatives, such as WS-Security and WS-Policy,” he said. “WS-Security and WS-Policy are more concerned with specific user access to business logic, but there are clearly going to be cases when the two specifications will need to overlap. At the very least, any comprehensive security platform for Web Services will need to handle both of these sets of specifications — provisioning of physical and virtual assets and the access to these applications.”

Read more at: Internetnews.com

Making Hay: Web service managers are off to an early start

Jason Bloomberg, analyst with ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., says one way to make sense of it is to separate the players into active and passive managers. “Amberpoint and Confluent are two of the better-known active management vendors,” he explains. Active management software is able to exert some control over the XML messages it monitors.

Swingtide and Service Integrity are passive players. “These guys just sit there and sniff,” says Bloomberg: “They listen to the XML going by and create reports and alerts.”

Read more at: Intelligent Enterprise

IBM Tests Web Services SLA Technology

“SLAs and Web services management in general are an absolute necessity for companies looking to deploy reliable service-oriented architectures based on Web services,” said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, in Cambridge, Mass. “You can’t run a Web service in an environment where the service has to do something useful if you can’t guarantee that it is performing. This is not even a nice-to-have, but a must-have.

“If not, Web services simply can’t take off in a commercial environment,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: eWeek