Vordel Announces OEM Agreement With CA

David Linthicum, Managing Partner at analyst firm ZapThink commented that, “The ability to apply policies to SOA is critical. Using Vordel’s XML Gateway technology as an integral component of a centralized policy-based approach to SOA is a smart move.”

Read more at: Vordel Press Release

Vordel: Centralized Policy Management Infrastructure

Policy management is quickly becoming a core need when considering the implementation of operational and effective SOA implementations. However, many people don’t consider policy management until it’s too late, and difficult to retrofit. Indeed, the use and management of policies provide the central control mechanism that provides clear value when considering the return on investment of SOA. . Policies are as important to SOA as Services themselves, and they should be managed throughout their lifecycles as such.

Policy management requires operational lifecycle support, like any other development effort. Such management includes the migration through development, testing, staging, and finally the operations of the policy in the production environment. Moreover, policy management requires other facilities, including centralized logging of all critical metrics gathered during the policy operations, allowing the managers of the SOA implementation to gather key data points used to enhance operational efficiencies.

Practical SOA

A thought-provoking look at the challenges facing SOA today, as well as the organizations struggling to build acceptance for SOA initiatives.

Presented at the Vordel User Conference on October 4, 2007.

27 slide PowerPoint presented in pdf format.

Organizational Adoption of SOA Best Practices

The organizational, political, and cultural challenges organizations face as they plan and implement SOA.

Presented at the Vordel User Conference on October 4, 2007.

25 slide PowerPoint presented in pdf format.

Vordel 3rd Annual SOA Security Conference focuses on practical control of SOA

Vordel will play host this October in Dublin to many of the industry’s leading analysts, vendors, systems integrators and end user organizations at its 3rd annual SOA Security user conference. Focusing on the theme of Practical Control of the SOA, the event offers attendees an excellent mix of strategic enterprise architecture advice coupled with practical with hands on training. Keynote presentations will include Sean Baker of Iona, Jason Bloomberg from ZapThink, David Yeates at EBS Building Society, Paddy Keenan Chief Architect with Atos Origin, Daniel Mothersdale of nCipher and many others.

Read more at: Vordel Press Release

Growing a Secure & Managed SOA

This 28-page PowerPoint presentation in pdf format offers a concise outline of ZapThink’s thinking on the three core infrastructure issues for SOA: Security, Management and Governance.

It was presented at the Vordel User Conference in Dublin, Ireland, in June 2006.

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.

Free Tools Speed Web-Services Security

“Vordel does appear to be first to market with a Web-services security testing tool,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, Cambridge, Mass.

“There are a range of Web-services testing and monitoring tools on the market from such companies as Parasoft [Corp.], Westbridge Technology [Inc.], Service Integrity [Inc.], and Mindreef [Inc.], and IBM and Microsoft offer Web-services security development tools, but none of these offer Web-services security testing. So Vordel is definitely filling a need with this tool.

“Vordel is a company currently at a transition point, moving to a new, broader version of their software and finally looking to enter the U.S. market,” Bloomberg said. “This tool should definitely get them some international attention at just the right time.”

Read more at: eWeek

WS Security and Adoption

Without WS Security and its affiliated standards, some of which have yet to be submitted to OASIS — a sore point with competitors of MS and IBM — WS will remain behind the firewall and used primarily the way it is being used today, as an integration tool, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, a New York-based Web services-centric consultancy.

“We see it as the primary road block to Web services adoption, both within the enterprise and particularly for business-to-business communication of Web services,” he said. “The importance of WS Security is really best understood in the context of (the) road map. WS Security by itself builds a layer of abstraction on top of underlying security mechanism. So, if one company or department is using Kerberos and another is using PKI, you can use WS Security to federate those two. So, all by itself, it’s a piece of the puzzle.”

Read more at: eSecurity Planet

Application firewalls good enough — for now — for Web services security

While functions such as identity management will become increasingly important, “If somebody can just look at the content of a SOAP message and pick out your credit card number, it doesn’t help much,” says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, a Web services research firm in Waltham, Mass.

Read more at: SearchSecurity (TechTarget)