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Breaking News - Operating Systems & Middleware:

Confluent Announces Next Generation Web Services Platform

Building on its tradition of pioneering Web Services solutions, Confluent Software Inc announced availability, by the end of December, of its next generation Web Services Management Platform. For the first time, decentralized IT organizations will be able to effectively enforce security and Quality of Service best practices across large numbers of XML Web services, owned and developed by different departments or partners, and deployed on heterogeneous platforms and transport protocols.

"The addition of cross-platform policy enforcement features extends the scope of Confluent's product offering in Web services management. It targets the growing requirement for organizations to control and enforce policies for a highly-distributed services environment across the entire enterprise," said Sandra Rogers, director of Web services and integration software research at IDC.

With Confluent developers, system architects and operations staff can now collaborate in designing operational best practices and leverage the Confluent solution to enforce them across the extended enterprise. For example, enterprise security architects are now able to define security policies, which can then be commonly enforced across the entire service network, while order fulfillment application owners retain the autonomy to define and enforce operational polices for their specific best practice compliance needs.

Confluent customers can be reassured that their application interactions will comply with their operational best practices, even when they opt for a phased approach to the deployment of service-oriented architectures in order to leverage their existing IT investments. Whether communications among applications occur through standards-compliant Web services or through XML messages transported over JMS and MQ, Confluent run-time enforcement components intercept all service requests and ensure the right operational policies are applied, before any application interaction occurs.

Because efficiency, flexibility and reliability are key to successful IT operations, powerful new enhancements to Confluent's offerings will also allow IT managers to migrate Confluent run-time enforcement components together with the applications they control, when these are moved from the development environment to staging, and finally to production. This greatly reduces the cost and complexity of maintaining control of distributed mission-critical application environments. Multiple versions of the same operational policies will be able to coexist in the same deployment environment to facilitate migration of complex installations. Additionally, every component of the Confluent Web services Management Platform can be clustered and load-balanced, ensuring the highest-possible performance and availability of XML Web Service based processes.

"Until now, Web services management products have been capable only of department-level Web services management," said Alain Couder, president and CEO of Confluent Software. "By offering enterprises the ability to enforce operational best practices across an multiple departments, platforms and transport protocols, Confluent is paving the way toward large, enterprise- class deployments of Web services-based applications."

The new release of Confluent Web Services Management Platform will be available at the end of December.

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