Start-up tackles SOA management

Start-up TrueBaseline this week is expected to debut its first product, which is aimed at helping companies keep IT resources and business processes in shape to comply with myriad regulatory, competitive and operational requirements.

SOAComply lets users plan, monitor and control distributed environments that follow the principles of a service-oriented architecture (SOA ). Users can model different "operating states" that establish configuration, status and behavior rules to which application, system and network resources must adhere. For example, a company could define an operating state for achieving compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or an operating state required to handle peak sales periods. SOAComply would then alert users if anything is amiss, from the state of the applications to the bandwidth required to complete a task, says Stan Kramer, CEO of TrueBaseline.

The software originated in the nuclear power industry. Westinghouse Electric Co. developed it internally to comply with rules set out by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that require rigid adherence to system configuration parameters. Later Westinghouse began selling its StatePointPlus software to other companies, and early this year sold the technology and assets to TrueBaseline's founders.

The technology differs from traditional IT change and configuration management products in its SOA orientation, says Thomas Nolle, president and CEO of consultancy CIMI. "SOA multiplies the number of systems that you have to look at, and the number of application pieces,so much that the process isn't scalable," Nolle says. Key to TrueBaseline's technology is that it models not only resources but also relationships between resources, he says.

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Start-up TrueBaseline this week is expected to debut its first product, which is aimed at helping companies keep IT resources and business processes in shape to comply with myriad regulatory, competitive and operational requirements.

SOAComply lets users plan, monitor and control distributed environments that follow the principles of a service-oriented architecture (SOA ). Users can model different "operating states" that establish configuration, status and behavior rules to which application, system and network resources must adhere. For example, a company could define an operating state for achieving compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or an operating state required to handle peak sales periods. SOAComply would then alert users if anything is amiss, from the state of the applications to the bandwidth required to complete a task, says Stan Kramer, CEO of TrueBaseline.

The software originated in the nuclear power industry. Westinghouse Electric Co. developed it internally to comply with rules set out by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that require rigid adherence to system configuration parameters. Later Westinghouse began selling its StatePointPlus software to other companies, and early this year sold the technology and assets to TrueBaseline's founders.

The technology differs from traditional IT change and configuration management products in its SOA orientation, says Thomas Nolle, president and CEO of consultancy CIMI. "SOA multiplies the number of systems that you have to look at, and the number of application pieces,so much that the process isn't scalable," Nolle says. Key to TrueBaseline's technology is that it models not only resources but also relationships between resources, he says.

TrueBaseline plans to partner extensively, and one of its first is NetScout Systems, which makes network and application performance management software. SOAComply can correlate network status and activity data collected by NetScout with its other resources to determine if all of the resources associated with an application or business process are in place, Kramer says.

General availability is slated for the second quarter. Pricing starts at $25,000 for the base technology.

Click to see: Profile:TrueBaseline

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