Vendors tackle SOA management, security

As the concept of service-oriented architecture begins to find life in corporate computing, a handful of vendors this week plans to unveil software to help companies manage and secure their SOAs, as well as integrate them with legacy systems.

Amberpoint is expected to announce its intent to ship this month Version 5.0 of its security and management software that includes a new policy system designed to help manage large collections of Web services. Also, Forum Systems, GT Software, Mindreef and SOA Software plan to unveil wares at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit in Orlando, Fla.

Amberpoint 5.0, which costs $70,000 per server, features a policy system that allows users to manage Web services as a set or group rather than one at a time. The company also has retooled its security subsystem and added management support for non-XML traffic, such as Java.

"With 5.0 you can have a bucket of services and policies applied to those buckets," says Jorge Mercado, SOA architect for MedicAlert, a nonprofit foundation that provides a repository of healthcare information. "This gives us a way to throw services in a bucket and have a set of policies ready to go." Mercado plans to begin testing Amberpoint 5.0 this month, because he says the current policies and procedures used for his growing list of Web services won't scale.

Forum Systems is expected to release Forum Vantage XML Accelerator, an appliance built on a 64-bit platform that can process more than 10,000 XML messages per second. The 1U appliance, which is priced at $45,000, supports Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages, XML Schema Validation, XPath processing and XSLT transformations.

GT Software is set to ship Ivory Service Architect, a set of tools for implementing an SOA using existing mainframe hardware, data, applications and developer skills. The product, which is priced at $25,000, is made up of Ivory Studio and Ivory Server. Studio is a graphical tool for building mainframe operations into business services, while Server has a SOAP processor, service flow processor and central service repository.

SOA Software plans to reveal that it has acquired Merrill Lynch's X4ML Mainframe Web services platform, which the financial services firm developed four years ago and uses today to support 600 Web services. SOA Software will sell the platform as service-oriented legacy architecture. Pricing was not announced. (For more on Merrill Lynch's efforts.)

Mindreef is scheduled to release Mindreef Coral, a Web services collaboration platform for companies building Web services and SOAs. The Coral server, which costs about $1,000, stores data and includes tools that let users test, diagnose and support Web services. The tools are tailored to specific types of users, such as architects, managers, business analysts, developers and testers. (Read more about vendors are doing with SOA features.)