Computer Associates Shows its WSDM
Though its solution won't be available in the channel for some time, the Islandia, N.Y.-based firm announced support for the new strategy from a range of industry partners, including BEA, Collaxa, DataPower, Mindreef and Systinet, to name a few.
According to Dmitri Tcherevik, CA's vice president of Web Services, the new service incorporates pre-existing solutions for J2EE and .NET, making it a tool designed to manage the services themselves as opposed to the infrastructure that delivers them. He added that the adjoining partner component gives CA a Web Services management solution that can be integrated with a variety of other technologies, enhancing the product's power even more.
"This is a watershed event for CA and the industry as a whole," Tcherevik told CRN. "Web services is a popular technology and we wanted in."
Unicenter WSDM joins a handful of tools from smaller startups in providing insight into the performance of Web services, and works with any Web service based on the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) industry standard. Tcherevik explained that by automatically discovering, testing, and monitoring Web services applications, Unicenter WSDM will enable IT organizations to track a range of performance indicators and respond to service interruptions rapidly.
Ultimately, this kind of automatic, self-healing network management could lead to CA's entry into the utility computing market.
More immediately, however, the new Unicenter offering also will be integrated with products and services from solution providers, allowing customers to mix-and-match functionality depending on their needs. For instance, Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Collaxa will integrate with Unicenter WSDM to manage Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes running on the Collaxa BPEL server, while Cambridge, Mass.-based DataPower Technology will embed in-band Unicenter WSDM-compliant monitoring into its Web services security and XML-processing hardware.
Other partnership details include:
-Atlanta-based JBoss will develop a native Unicenter WSDM observer for the JBoss open source application server platform
-Hollis, N.H.-based Mindreef will integrate a Unicenter WSDM fault-alerting mechanism into its SOAPScope diagnostic system.
-Systinet, also in Cambridge, Mass., will offer a Unicenter WSDM-compliant observer plug-in for its Web Applications and Services Platform.
Despite this built-in partner network, Tcherevik said that CA plans to follow company precedent and vend the Unicenter WSDM direct for at least a year. He noted that "some part of the product will be available through our partners" immediately, and insisted that more of the product will be available through partners as 2004 goes on.
Still, these predictions from CA administrators didn't seem to dampen partner spirits at all. "The fact that you have CA coming in and doing this changes everything," said Mindreef CTO Mark Ericson. "They've got a great customer base and we're confident that they'll attract enough interest in this to get us some business out of it, too."
Wendell Lansford, COO at Cambridge, Mass.-based Systinet, agreed completely. Lansford noted that with the backing of a major national developer and vendor such as CA, Web services should start to garner the attention of customers who will seek it out through the channel when the time is right.
"What's interesting in CA's involvement into this market is the level of credibility and validation that they bring to Web services as a viable integration technology," he said. "From our channel perspective, we see this as legitimizing our technology for important business applications and mission-critical deployments down the road."
CA unveiled a beta release of its Unicenter WSDM solution last July at the CA World conference in Las Vegas. Pricing varies widely by implementation, CA said.