PubliGroupe is a global leader in the media and advertising industry. Headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, PubliGroupe has 2,850 employees and reached revenues of more than 2 billion CHF (US$1.5 billion) in 2005. Its new venture in the classifieds market, Publiconnect, meets the print and online advertising needs of large corporate customers. Publiconnect manages a portfolio of more than a thousand of the company’s biggest classifieds customers and devises tailored solutions for the real estate and employment markets. Consultas—another member company of PubliGroupe—is charged with the organization’s technology research and development activities.
Publiconnect and Consultas chose AmberPoint for its comprehensive SOA runtime governance capabilities and its uniquely non-invasive approach, which provides end-to-end management without requiring additional coding to the services themselves.
"Without SOA as the architecture for our new developments, we could not expect to reach our business goals," says Didier DURAND, head of business engineering, Publiconnect. "Yet with its many advantages, SOA also brings the need for tools to ensure that automated business services are delivered with great confidence and perform with the quality of services we expect from day one."
With SOA, governing the runtime operation of the system poses new challenges. PubliGroupe found that, as its use of Web services grew, an increasing number of application components were beyond its control. Additionally, internally developed Web services were increasingly being used by partners and customers in ways PubliGroupe might not even know about. Without SOA monitoring and management capabilities, it would be virtually impossible to define the source of application problems, such as performance and availability issues. Thus, it was clear to PubliGroupe that comprehensive monitoring capabilities were required from the outset of its move to SOA-based systems.
Consultas and Publiconnect conducted an extensive review of SOA runtime governance software before selecting a solution. They looked at the market, considered the various approaches to management and looked at the pedigree of the vendors. From this review, they found that AmberPoint best understood their requirements and had the most robust solution for their needs. A proof of concept validated these management capabilities on the company’s existing Web services.
"We chose to work with AmberPoint because we needed a solution to monitor and manage all the SOA components so that we could define appropriate service level agreements and then manage the system to those SLAs," says Charles Lentz, IT Architect at Publigroupe/Consultas. "Our partners could then monitor the system on a real-time basis to ensure that the services are delivered according to expectations."
AmberPoint also brought real-time insight and control to PubliGroupe’s growing services network. AmberPoint SOA Management System rides herd over new services-based applications, as well as legacy systems with Web services interfaces. It can monitor and manage any variety of services—internally developed application components and services running on the other side of the corporate firewall.
"We’re very pleased with our choice of AmberPoint," says Lentz. "We now have insight into the real-time characteristics of our SOA system. Our internal reviews are now based on facts, validating that we deliver services according to our SLAs. And with AmberPoint we can actively control system behavior by automating response to such things as poor performance or unexpected conditions."
About AmberPoint
AmberPoint is the industry’s leading provider of SOA visibility, management and security solutions. Customers such as British Telecommunications, H&R Block, Motorola and the U.S. Department of Defense have chosen AmberPoint for its comprehensive capabilities, its non-invasive approach and its native support for Java and .NET. For more information, contact AmberPoint at 510.663.6300 or info@amberpoint.com.
Press Contacts:
AmberPoint, Inc.
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Kim Abreu
Atomic Public Relations
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kim@atomicpr.com
