Web Services Startup Hitches Wagon To Visual Studio .Net

In the second half of the year, Visual Studio developers will only have to click a check box to configure a .Net application for AmberPoint, officials with both companies said Tuesday from the VSLive conference in San Francisco. Currently, developers have to tweak a .Net component themselves to register it within the AmberPoint environment.

Also in the second half of the year, developers will be able to access AmberPoint functionality from within Microsoft's Operations Manager. However, the integration plans for the two products are still being discussed.

"We're still working out what that integration will look like," Dan Hay, lead product manager for Visual Studio, said.

AmberPoint enables IT managers to monitor communication between applications using Web services standards, which leverage extensible markup language, or XML, for passing data. The Oakland, Calif., company's product provides data related to the content of the message traffic.

For example, AmberPoint can be configured through business rules to monitor how many orders of a particular model car with 0 percent financing moved to an order-management system within the last five hours. The software is configured through a graphical user interface, so no coding is involved.

AmberPoint, along with competitors Confluent Software Inc., Digital Evolution Inc., and Actional Corp., are "gaining traction" within the Web services management market, Jason Bloomberg, analyst for high-tech researcher ZapThink, said. Unlike many of the 14 startups selling Web services-management software, the four companies have customers and partnerships with bigger vendors and are shipping product. Confluent, for example, also has a relationship with Microsoft.

The big question is whether any of the companies will survive as major vendors like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and others gradually add more Web services capabilities to their own management tools. With so many startups, most are likely to either fizzle or be acquired.

"Because the big guys are going to be dominating Web services management within about two years, what are these small guys going to do?" Bloomberg said. "There's too many vendors, and the big guys are going to be eating them for lunch in a couple of years."

In the meantime, AmberPoint's relationship with Microsoft gives the smaller company a product that provides native support for both the .Net and competing Java 2 enterprise platform. This cross-platform capability puts the AmberPoint product on the short list of any company looking for this type of software tool today, Bloomberg said.

AmberPoint, founded in 2001, has been working closely since last summer with Microsoft. The .Net version of AmberPoint's product is written in C#, a language developed by Microsoft that competes with Java. .Net is Microsoft's platform for building and deploying applications to incorporate emerging Web services standards.

AmberPoint also makes a version of its product for companies with IT systems based on the Java 2 enterprise platform, a competitor of .Net. Ed Horst, vice president of marketing for AmberPoint, said the company's relationship with Microsoft would have no affect on its development cycle for the Java product.

"Customers very typically have a heterogeneous environment," Horst said. "Every Java shop has .Net somewhere."

The planned integration with Microsoft Operations Manager is expected to give IT managers a more complete view of their distributed application environment. MOM is more focused on monitoring application performance, while AmberPoint manages the content flow, Hay said.

Pricing related to the VisualStudio, MOM, and AmberPoint integrations was not disclosed.

*This story courtesy of Techweb.com.