CA Ships Web Services Management Tools

Computer Associates International Inc. on Monday shipped its first web services management products and announced more than a half-dozen related partnerships, marking a significant shift in a market dominated by small companies and startups.

Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management tracks application performance, notifying system administrators when predetermined levels are not met. The product monitors software interfaces built according to Web services standards.

Unicenter WSDM stems from CA's acquisition in the summer of Adjoin. Rival Hewlett-Packard Co. acquired earlier in the year web services management startup Talking Blocks. IBM, the third major vendor in the systems management space, has yet to release a product roadmap.

"IBM is still sort of struggling with getting the Tivoli (product) group in line with the overall software effort," Jason Bloomberg, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said. "(But) they are definitely talking about web services management."

Although the three big vendors are following startups Actional, AmberPoint, Confluent and others, in the web services management space, the market is still young. Therefore, there's plenty of time for the major players to build more capabilities into their product lines."Time is on the side of these large management vendors," ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer said. "As time goes on, and (web services) management features become more and more required, the large vendors will increasingly catch up. The startups have a window of opportunity of at most another two years."

Those small companies that are not acquired will have to find a market niche to survive, Schmelzer said.

CA's management tools use embedded code within application servers to monitor messages, based on extensible markup language, sent between web services applications. The software monitors communication speeds and watches for failures in completing tasks, passing on the data to Unicenter's overall monitoring console, which also tracks the performance of hardware, such as servers and storage devices, and application infrastructure software.

As web services adoption accelerates, it will become more important to add monitoring tools as part of an overall IT management system. "You need to have that visibility. Otherwise, your creating more work for the poor guy in the data center that has to track down problems," Schmelzer said. "At some point, this all has to be pulled together."

Along with the release of Unicenter WSDM, Islandia, N.Y.-based, CA announced companies that have agreed to support the product, including BEA Systems, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, open-source application server maker JBoss Group, business process integration software maker Collaxa, DataPower, which makes tools for accelerating XML-based message traffic; and tools vendor Systinet.CA said it intends to support the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) specification under development by OASIS, an international standards body, and scheduled for release early next year. Products supporting WSDM would be able to share monitoring and performance data without custom coding.