Transaction Minder 6.0

Netegrity has announced the release of Transaction Minder 6.0. The big news for this release is its Web Services security play. TM 6.0 includes full support for WSSE 1.0, which means the product can consume and produce WS Security headers for all three approved profiles (Username/Token, X.509 and SAML token). Transaction Minder 6.0 also provides limited WS Encryption support; either the full document or header can be encrypted. Individual elements within a SOAP document cannot be encrypted/decrypted. That means point-to-point exchanges can easily be secured but that exchanges requiring an intermediary may be problematic unless keys are shared. Most XML exchanges today are point-to-point, but intermediaries - such as XML Security Gateways - will become more prevalent and will require the ability to dig down and encrypt individual elements within an XML document. Netegrity says it's watching this need closely across its customer base.

TM 6.0 is not a replacement for perimeter solutions such as those offerings from DataPower, ForumSystems, Westbridge and Reactivity. Rather it is designed to be a complementary system that extends comprehensive triple-A and SSO support to Web Services. TM 6.0 does not provide traditional network perimeter based security in the form of schema validation, data scrubbing or attack scanning; rather it is designed to provide a mechanism for enterprises to integrate Web Services into their existing security infrastructure.

That's a good move for Netegrity considering that it is one of the major partners XML Security Gateway vendors turn to for identity management integration. Competing with partners is never a good idea and Netegrity appears to have done a fine job of walking that line, providing value for both the enterprise and partners while annoying neither.

TM 6.0 will be generally available the end of this month and is priced at $40,000/CPU.