Start-ups key in on Web services

Two start-ups last week introduced products that should help corporate customers monitor and manage Web services  environments.

Confluent Software rolled out three products designed to help corporations integrate, manage and monitor distributed applications built with Web services. Meanwhile, Mindreef  will introduce SOAPScope, its diagnostic tool that monitors Web services traffic, much like today's network monitors, and pinpoints problems.

Both companies are driven by the fact that most of the Web services hype has focused on integration and not on the security and management shortcomings of the technology.

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Two start-ups last week introduced products that should help corporate customers monitor and manage Web services  environments.

Confluent Software rolled out three products designed to help corporations integrate, manage and monitor distributed applications built with Web services. Meanwhile, Mindreef  will introduce SOAPScope, its diagnostic tool that monitors Web services traffic, much like today's network monitors, and pinpoints problems.

Both companies are driven by the fact that most of the Web services hype has focused on integration and not on the security and management shortcomings of the technology.

"Web services may be great for integrating systems, but they don't do anything to manage all the connections you will have," says Brent Sleeper, principal and co-founder of The Stencil Group consultancy. Sleeper says Web services with its loosely coupled components could result in distributed applications that have anywhere from one to 1,000 connections across the network.

Confluent says it hopes to address this issue with its Core Web Service Integration and Management Platform, which is made up of three modules - Integrator, Manager and Analyzer.

"With Core, we are mapping networking into a Web services context," says Rajiv Gupta, Confluent's co-founder. Gupta, who helped pioneer Web services as the general manager of Hewlett-Packard's failed eSpeak Web services platform, says he is putting what he learned to work. "The scar tissue has been helpful," he says.

The modules, which start at $50,000, run as applications on a variety of Web Application Servers including BEA Systems' WebLogic, IBM's WebSphere, Microsoft's .Net, Sun's Sun One and open source Apache Tomcat.

• Integrator is a traffic cop. It's a proxy between distributed Web services, and defines and enforces policies that control their interaction. Integrator also logs activity, provides quality-of-service routing and acts as a translator.
• Manager extracts information from Integrator into a console of gauges that monitor uptime/downtime, performance levels and security violations. It examines the headers of XML messages based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and tracks their behavior.
• Analyzer is for business executives. It looks into the payload of SOAP messages and extracts business information, such as buying patterns. Analyzer also can generate alerts based on pre-configured performance thresholds and produce activity reports.

Mindreef also is targeting SOAP traffic with its SOAPScope. The tool captures SOAP messages from a network, and stores and analyzes them as a means toward tracking down interoperability problems between Web services applications.

"We are debugging the message traffic in Web services applications," says Jim Moskun, who co-founded the company last year.

Mindreef initially is releasing a developer's version for $99. An enterprise version is expected early next year.

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