Service Integrity Has Inside Scoop On SOAs

“We think of ourselves as playing in the realtime business intelligence space,” said CEO and President Michael Madden, who had been CTO of ERP vendor JD Edwards before its 2003 acquisition by PeopleSoft. “That&'s because we sit between transactional systems and see what&'s going on in the business, now.”

In practice, that means Newton, Mass.-based Service Integrity&'s Sift software provides realtime intelligence on information handled by just about any application working on top of an SOA—be it of the composite variety or a traditional monolithic app. Such intelligence can be gleaned regardless of whether that application controls data center functions, registers new banking customers or examines store sales data streaming in from POS systems. What&'s more, Sift provides a rich, graphical interface for analyzing information interrelationships—enabling partners and customers to see where along an information chain a process breaks down or becomes overloaded, for instance. Other features include a rules-based engine and predictive alerting that, for example, anticipates when an IT component will fail. Sift also can automatically discover Web services and pull information from disparate data sources.

“We look at the semantic mismatch in the message, to see if something funny happened that can&'t be interpreted any more,” Madden said. “That means you can see where the problems with the information lie and pinpoint the issues.”

So, for example, one systems integrator partner used the software to help pharmaceutical company Pfizer get a handle on its expense-management system, which comprised five applications feeding into a single front end. Another partner integrated the software with Hewlett-Packard&'s OpenView, allowing that package to examine software in the data center at the component level.

Now Service Integrity is ready to expand its channel program to about 20 systems integrators. “About 50 percent of our business is going through partners now,” said Madden. “My objective is to have two-thirds of all sales go through the channel, and keep direct just so we can see what&'s happening.”