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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
AmberPoint SOFTWARE OFFERS ENHANCED SOA, WEB SERVICES MGMT
AmberPoint Inc announced a new release of its software for managing
service-oriented architectures comprised of Web services and other components.
AmberPoint's latest release delivers valuable new capabilities to meet rapidly
advancing customer requirements for managing greater complexity, enhancing
reliability and handling greater scalability as their service-oriented systems
grow. The new release of AmberPoint represents significant enhancements across
all AmberPoint solutions: Service Level Manager, Exception Manager and
AmberPoint Management Foundation.
"Our move to a real-time enterprise is accelerating the need for event-driven
interfaces between systems," said John Schmidt, IS leader at Best Buy. "As
these loosely coupled systems become more widespread, we require additional
means of managing them, understanding the dependencies among system components
and handling increased traffic. With its new release, AmberPoint is addressing
such requirements to help ensure that our systems are reliable business
assets."
The new release of AmberPoint addresses additional requirements of
enterprise-wide applications running across service oriented architectures
(SOA). For example, AmberPoint now supports real-time management of thousands
of active service level agreements across multiple customers and services. To
reduce complexity, it automatically discovers services and displays
interdependencies across service-oriented systems. To ensure optimal
availability and performance of the management layer, AmberPoint has
introduced the industry's first recoverable services management system.
"AmberPoint continues to strengthen its product suite to meet customer
requirements," said Simon Walker, Web services development manager at British
Telecommunications Plc. "With its latest release, AmberPoint is delivering
capabilities that are important to larger-scale enterprise deployments. The
enhancements in AmberPoint will simplify the work of managing and maintaining
rapidly growing service oriented environments."
"As our service-oriented systems continue to grow, we need better ways to
manage the mounting complexity of these distributed systems," said Toby
Redshaw, corporate vice president of IT Strategy Architecture and eBusiness at
Motorola. "This elevates the role of the management layer. AmberPoint's new
release will enable us to better manage our progressively more sophisticated
services-oriented environment and to manage service levels effectively in the
face of significant increases to the number of active connections."
"Whereas a year ago the services-based applications we were called on to
manage often had only a dozen services and up to a hundred service agreements,
this year it has changed radically," said Gordon Loudon, vice president of
Customer Support and Services at AmberPoint. "This year our customers are
rolling-out systems with thousands of endpoints and thousands of active
service agreements. And we're seeing this sort of increase in complexity
across a variety of industries, including retail, telecommunications,
manufacturing and insurance."
This new release builds on earlier releases of AmberPoint that greatly
expanded the types of SOA software and hardware components that can be managed
using AmberPoint, including both SOAP and non-SOAP XML, HTML Web pages,
hardware switches and blade servers.
Managing Application Complexity
AmberPoint enables the Operations staff to more easily track services
throughout the system. Additionally, AmberPoint uses a patent-pending message
fingerprinting technology to discover service interdependencies across
platforms (language, application server and operating system) throughout the
enterprise:
- Automated service discovery.
- Automated discovery and graphical representation of service
interdependencies.
- Dynamic assignment of service level agreements and performance targets.
- Graphical representation of services network.
- Virtualization of services: Hides users and dependent services from changes
and rearrangements of service definitions.
- Visualization of exceptions: graphical representation for root cause
analysis.
Managing the Management System
The reliability of the management system itself is critical to the success of
Web services-driven business initiatives. AmberPoint has introduced new
capabilities that ensure optimal reliability and performance from the
management system.
- Recoverable management system: AmberPoint can automatically rebuild its
critical management information in case of disk failure.
- No single point of failure: There is no single point of failure than can
disable processing of a service.
Massive Scalability
AmberPoint supports high transaction volumes, handling thousands of active
service level agreements across multiple customers and services. AmberPoint
has also streamlined the user experience for customers with higher transaction
volumes by simplifying the creation of policies and allowing for simpler,
hierarchical categorization of QoS data. Additional new scalability features
include:
- Baselining: Users can set service levels and thresholds based on averages
and relative variances, which are automatically tabulated by AmberPoint.
- Data model optimization: The methods for writing, reading and storing data
are optimized for different data models
"From working closely with our customers, we've seen firsthand their evolving
requirements for management, and we release new products to stay ahead of
those market needs," said Paul Butterworth, AmberPoint CTO. "The architectural
underpinnings of our management platform remove the burden of implementing our
product upgrades. Our customers can add new management capabilities such as
interdependency tracking without having to recode their services."
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