Web services vendors Actional and Westbridge this week are set to merge and combine elements of their management and security software into a single platform designed to help companies manage and monitor service-oriented architectures.
Web services vendors Actional and Westbridge this week are set to merge and combine elements of their management and security software into a single platform designed to help companies manage and monitor service-oriented architectures.
The merger is evidence of the consolidation taking place among Web services vendors, which included last month’s acquisition of Flamenco by Digital Evolution. The mergers, acquisitions and partnerships mean corporate adopters should have fewer piece parts to pull together to build an SOA.
The company, which will operating under the Actional name, still plans to offer its traditional independent products such as Actional’s SoapStation for management and Westbridge’s XML Message Server for security. It also plans this week to introduce the Actional SOA Command and Control Platform for coordinating and governing everything that happens within an SOA, including identity and directory services and policy management, and monitoring other Web services functions such as gateways, firewalls, brokers and message queuing.
Multiple paths
“People are more pragmatic. They’re stepping back and saying there are different parts of the infrastructure we need to address in relationship to security, management and integration such as routing, communication and transformation,” says Frank Kenney, research analyst with Gartner.
The two companies also will combine Actional’s Looking Glass and Westbridge’s XMS Management Console into the SOA Command and Control Platform. The suite will include agents that can run on infrastructure nodes, including SoapStation and XMS, as well as other SOA products from competitors such as Blue Titan, DataPower and Sonic.
Actional officials say the Command and Control Platform will give users a bird’s eye view and unified control over what they call the “fabric” layer of the SOA, where security, management, message queuing and other services reside.
“Together they coordinate all the activities in the fabric and allow you to do things like drive policy and compliance into other platforms, into their native engines,” says Tom Ryan, former CEO of Westbridge and now the head of Actional.
Those capabilities eventually will thrust Actional into competition with traditional management vendors such as Computer Associates and HP, which are re-architecting their management products for Web services and SOA.
“Actional has articulated a very thorough road map vs. some of the other acquisitions in this market, and that bodes well for them,” says Sandy Rogers, research director with IDC. “Enterprise buyers need a comfort level with how these acquisitions and mergers map into their own strategies.”
Actional plans to roll out the Command and Control Platform in two phases.
The first, which is expected to be available next month, will include the ability to control service level, availability and performance across SOA products, and have one console for policy management. In the second phase, expected to be available in the first half of next year, Actional will offer policy management across the entire SOA fabric, and will introduce a set of open policy management interfaces used to push policies into an SOA.
The Command and Control Platform costs $75,000.
As part of the merger, the combined company will receive a $12.9 million round of funding from investors that include August Capital, ArrowPath Venture Capital, Granite Ventures and International Capital Partners.
