Confluent Upgrades Web Services Management Platform

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at Zapthink, said that Confluent’s platform is particularly useful for enterprises with networks comprised of different technologies and protocols.

“[Confluent's] ability to operate across multiple transport protocols and system platforms, combined with its broad offering of specialized agents for new and legacy applications, provides an excellent solution for companies that want to capitalize on the promise of Web services and build [service-oriented architectures] without compromising security or quality of service,” he said.

Read more at: CRN

Confluent Extends Support To TIBCO, C

“Companies today are building service-oriented architectures (SOAs) often because their value chains rely upon patchworks of different technologies and protocols,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, Zapthink LLC. “Confluent’s ability to operate across multiple transport protocols and system platforms, combined with its broad offering of specialized agents for new and legacy applications, provides an excellent solution for companies that want to capitalize on the promise of Web services and build SOAs without compromising security or quality of service.” The introduction of Confluent Agent for TIBCO and Confluent Agent for C “further extends Confluent’s wide support for multiple platforms and multiple transports already available in the newly released 3.5 version of Confluent Web Services Management Platform,” Confluent says. “Confluent Agent for TIBCO helps users enforce operational rules and monitor interactions between business applications connected by TIBCO BusinessWorks. TIBCO BusinessWorks customers can use Confluent to ensure every service request, to or from business applications participating in a managed business process, complies with security and quality-of-service best practices.”

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Web services shakeout looming

“We definitely see (that) 2004 will be make-or-break for all new entrants,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at Web services research company ZapThink. “A couple of those (management) companies might survive, but five years down the road, they will be different companies.”

Read more at: CNet

Infravio brings Web Services to Sabre

“Sabre does a ton of transactions per day, and if they even load a small percentage of that on Web Services and use Infravio to manage the mix, that will bode well for the spread of SOAs in the enterprise,” said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, a Waltham, Mass. market research company.

“Infravio’s greatest obstacle is that their management story is different from the other players in the space like AmberPoint [Inc.], Actional [Corp.], and Confluent [Software Inc.],” said Jason Bloomberg, another analyst with ZapThink. “So, they have a challenge explaining their value proposition to companies who have sent RFPs to all the management vendors. However, they do have a great story and a solid product, so customers are beginning to listen.”

Read more at: eWeek

Will David or Goliath manage your Web services?

Jason Bloomberg heartily agrees. “There are still too many vendors in this space,” said the senior analyst from Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC. “There aren’t enough customers to go around.”

Bloomberg said that the customer leader among the companies in this area is, by far, AmberPoint, which boasts 30 clients. “If the leader has 30, then you know the market can’t support eight vendors,” he said. “Come on.”

Bloomberg said that Unicenter WSDM is an attractive product for large organizations deploying multiple Web services, which is the target audience for most of the companies in this market. “It’s really a soup-to-nuts product,” he said. “It’s going to be the product to beat.”

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Five Technologies To Watch for 2004

Expect the Web services management market to gather more steam in 2004, as well as consolidate further, analysts and solution providers predict. Research firm ZapThink projects that the market will grow to $13 billion by 2007 from $35 million in 2003.

$13 Billion: Size of the Web Services Management market predicted by 2007 – Source: ZapThink.

Read more at: CRN

Service Orientation Market Trends

While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.

In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.

These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.

ZapNote: Infravio, Inc.

Infravio Ensemble is a Web Services management suite that offers full lifecycle management, configuration management, security management, monitoring, and alerting, built upon a metadata-driven architecture that offers APIs for security, transformation, transactions, orchestration, and event management — the complete set of functionality that Web Services management solutions should have.

However, what differentiates Infravio’s Ensemble solution from most other Web Services management offerings is their focus on managing Web Services Delivery Contracts, which allow Web Service designers to create generic Web Services and then define delivery, routing, SLA, and monitoring parameters that are specific to the consuming application. Infravio Ensemble’s ability to manage Web Service consumers as well as producers is a competitive differentiator for Infravio that supports the key SOA requirement of loose coupling across the Web Services lifecycle.

Business rules in Confluent’s world

Such an approach is important to large organizations that have many application “owners,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC. “You really have to manage your policies centrally,” he said. “Policies are enforced in a distributed fashion but managed centrally.”

Read more at: TechTarget

CA Ships Web Services Management Tools

Unicenter WSDM stems from CA’s acquisition in the summer of Adjoin. Rival Hewlett-Packard Co. acquired earlier in the year web services management startup Talking Blocks. IBM, the third major vendor in the systems management space, has yet to release a product roadmap.

“IBM is still sort of struggling with getting the Tivoli (product) group in line with the overall software effort,” Jason Bloomberg, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said. “(But) they are definitely talking about web services management.”

Although the three big vendors are following startups Actional, AmberPoint, Confluent and others, in the web services management space, the market is still young. Therefore, there’s plenty of time for the major players to build more capabilities into their product lines.

“Time is on the side of these large management vendors,” ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer said. “As time goes on, and (web services) management features become more and more required, the large vendors will increasingly catch up. The startups have a window of opportunity of at most another two years.”

Those small companies that are not acquired will have to find a market niche to survive, Schmelzer said.

Read more at: TechWeb