Forum Systems Announces Forum XWall(TM) Integrated with CA’s eTrust(R) TransactionMinder(R) at CA World 2005

“Policy enforcement, governance, and Web services security are three core challenges companies must face when building secure SOA implementations,” said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst for market research firm ZapThink LLC. “Forum Systems is among the leaders in the SOA security space, and their partnerships with a wide range of companies, including Computer Associates, offer a compelling value proposition for enterprises and government agencies to build comprehensive SOA security solutions that leverage existing infrastructure.”

Read more at: Forum Systems Press Release

CA opens a new chapter — again

“I think CA has done pretty well weathering the storm. They’ve emerged with a new leadership and a new plan,” said analyst Ron Schmelzer of ZapThink LLC. He likens the company to another famed sinner: Martha Stewart, whose stint in prison softened her shark-like reputation.

Read more at: IDG

Sun Looks to Capitalize on ‘Perfect Storm’

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said IBM, HP and CA do a better job than Sun integrating identity management into a larger service-oriented architecture (define). “Sun’s identity management solutions are the brightest light in their otherwise sub-par software offering,” Bloomberg told internetnews.com in an e-mail. He said Sun’s approach to integration is portability-centric — the strength of Java, versus the interoperability of its main competitors.

Read more at: InternetNews

Business in the driver’s seat

“It is an emerging market, and vendors approach it from different angles,” says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC, an IT research and consulting firm in Waltham, Mass. An effective, full-fledged IT governance product must perform four functions, he says. “It must provide a way for management to communicate its policies. It must give rank-and-file employees a way to implement the policies. It must give management visibility into whether the policies are being followed. And it should include mitigation techniques, so if there is a problem, there is a way to fix it,” he says.

Read more at: IDG.se

HP & Sun Check ID

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC thinks that Sun’s decision to open source its identity management technologies could have a knock-on effect across the industry. “It will benefit users by bringing prices down overall in the identity management software market,” he says. “The more open source solutions there are out there, the less value there is to buying a proprietary solution.”

Bloomberg believes this announcement helps HP move towards Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), which let users run services in the form of application software across different computing environments. “They are sort of cleaning up a lot of the old OpenView and moving towards a services oriented model,” he says.

With SOA technologies gaining momentum at the moment, Bloomberg feels that identity management is becoming even more important (see System Vendors Sight SOA). “You need identity management so that a request can be properly authorized and authenticated within a Service Oriented Architecture,” he says.

However, the big test for HP will be maneuvering the firm, which has recently undergone massive restructuring, to tackle SOA, according to Bloomberg. “For HP the challenge is turning their entire enterprise ship towards SOA,” he says.

Read more at: Next-Gen Data Center Forum

Vendors team up on systems management roadmap

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., said the road map helps demonstrate that progress is being made on technology for Web services and SOAs. “In general, all the vendors realise they have to play along with interoperability,” Bloomberg said. “Politics still could get in the way. But customers get upset with vendors that don’t interoperate.”

He added that although management tools supporting some of the upcoming standards should emerge within three years, they “will definitely be early-adopter products.”

Read more at: CIO Magazine

SAP Joined By Tech Giants In Business-Automation Push

“Bringing several major vendors together to agree to a single product approach to SOA is good for customers, because it will help make the interoperability promise of the services underlying the architecture a reality,” Jason Bloomberg, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said. “Broadly, this announcement is a signal that SOA is maturing, as incumbent vendors jump into the fray with both feet.”

Read more at: TechWeb

OASIS Tackles Unified Installs

Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink, said the specification will make it possible for companies to configure and manage different software packages without worrying about whether they’ll install correctly.

“There are so many points of integration, dependencies and rolling upgrades, especially with all the new virus and security threats out there, that no company can simply install a software package out of the box and expect it to work,” he said. “There are simply too many interdependencies among products to make that happen in a reliable way.”

There are vendors today that provide a third-party solution, he added, but they only address software that’s already been developed, not looking at software coming down the road.

“The OASIS SDD spec is looking forward at new software products and provides the configurability and interoperability before they are even implemented,” Schmelzer said. “Sort of a plug-and-play for software, but at a more granular level.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Big Blue Dips Into Federated ID

ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg said FIM differs from competing products because it covers the gamut of federated ID needs: identity and access management; single sign-on or federated user provisioning; and Web services security management.

“There are few other products on the market that can lay the claim of being so complete,” Bloomberg said. CA is currently integrating their eTrust and Netegrity product lines, and the resulting suite will give IBM a run for its money.”

“That being said, FIM is a substantial upgrade from Tivoli Access Manager, and brings the Tivoli product line squarely into IBM’s SOA product roadmap.”

Read more at: InternetNews

IBM to launch new security software

“It’s still an open question how CA will put all its pieces together” now that it has acquired Netegrity, said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst with ZapThink. “It’s still a horse race.”

Read more at: CNet