AmberPoint plans to unwrap Exception Manager, a complement to its existing Management Foundation and Service Level Manager products for managing how Web services are routed and accessed by other components in a distributed IT system, said Ed Horst, president of marketing at AmberPoint, San Francisco.

Exception Manager identifies when Web services are not acting properly or responding correctly to business needs, Horst said.

>>%A0AmberPoint Exception Manager identifies when Web services are not acting properly.

For example, he said a user can assign a rule to intercept a Web services transaction when a big-ticket product, such as an automobile, is erroneously sold for $10. Once a problem is identified, the software can correct the behavior in realtime.

Pricing for Exception Manager, due next quarter, starts at $50,000 for a specific application but can reach $500,000 if the product is deployed enterprisewide.

AmberPoint's pure-play rivals include Actional, Infravio, Confluent Software and Digital Evolution. It also faces competition from IBM, Computer Associates International and Hewlett-Packard, with its recent purchase of Talking Blocks.

Most observers agree that Web services will not become mainstream until the industry works out standards for Web services security, authentication, authorization and coordination.

Still, John Guerriere, vice president of marketing at Chicago-based ThoughtWorks, said many of his clients are implementing pilots to see how a service-oriented architecture might work in their enterprise. Software such as Exception Manager will fill a necessary role, he said.

"With distributed systems, you have pieces of functionality being executed all over the place," Guerriere said. "You need something to keep track if something falls outside a predefined parameter."