AmberPoint Nets $8.2 Million in Funding, Releases Software Update

The company also introduced a new version of its Web services management suite of software, adding enhancements to its Service Level Manager, Exception Manager and AmberPoint Management Foundation products.

New funding came from existing investors Crosslink Capital, Northwest Venture Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures, according to a press statement. A new investor, Motorola, also contributed to the round of Series C funding. So far, AmberPoint has raised $30.8 million in venture capital.

AmberPoint plans to use the new funding to expand engineering operations, as well as customer sales, supporting and marketing efforts, according to the company. The vendor also plans to build out its global presence, having recently opened new sales offices in Chicago and New York, as well as added technical support and new sales offices in London and Paris.

Significant new features in AmberPoint's updated product suite are aimed at enabling the development and deployment of services-oriented architectures. SOAs allow applications and application components to run as services that can invoke other applications or components in a distributed system. The business goal of the architecture is to cut back on development, deployment and operational costs of IT systems.

New features in the updated version of the AmberPoint software suite, available now, include automated service discovery, automated discovery and graphical representation of service interdependencies across a service-oriented system and dynamic assignment of service-level agreements (SLAs) and performance targets for services, according to the company.

Other enhancements include services virtualization, which hides users and dependent services from changes and rearrangements of service definitions, and assurance that no single point of failure will disable the processing of a service. In addition, AmberPoint has added features to enable more scalability of its software to support thousands of active SLAs across multiple customers and services.

AmberPoint is one of several pure-play vendors in the Web services management space that has not gotten snapped up by a larger vendor, although rumors have surfaced that the vendor might at some point be acquired by one of its partners, such as Microsoft, IBM or BEA Systems.

AmberPoint's pure-play competitors include Actional, Infravio, Confluent Software and Digital Evolution. Network management software vendors IBM, Computer Associates International and Hewlett-Packard and integration software vendors webMethods and BEA also are developing or have acquired Web services management software from smaller vendors.