AmberPoint Introduces Next-Generation SOA Runtime Governance

SOA Runtime Governance Leader Launches Release 6 with Groundbreaking New Capabilities for Visibility, Control and Automation

Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit, Nashville, TN, June 11, 2007 -- AmberPoint today announced the next release of its industry-leading runtime governance solutions for service oriented architecture (SOA) systems. The version 6 releases of AmberPoint SOA Management System and AmberPoint SOA Validation System deliver vital new capabilities for understanding and controlling heterogeneous applications. These new products are outgrowths of AmberPoint's close work with industry partners including BEA, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, TIBCO and others. With its new products, AmberPoint introduces capabilities that extend the breadth, depth and ease of real-time visibility into service networks, while also providing more comprehensive control.

"Due to their distributed nature, SOA assets and artifacts bring new requirements for visibility and control," said Frank Kenney, Research Director at Gartner. "Organizations that use SOA for any purpose need tools that not only give them insight into the operational condition of their systems but also provide mechanisms for reacting to and controlling system behavior in real time. The use of events and related automated processes enable governance and contribute to the success of the overall SOA Governance initiatives, the actual SOA implementation and the greater business agility.

Enhanced Visibility, Control and Automation across Platforms
SOA-based applications raise unprecedented requirements for ensuring system health and well being:

• Visibility: IT organizations must understand at a glance the real-time condition of loosely coupled systems


• Control: In the event of unexpected conditions, IT staff must intervene to fix issues and prevent change from disrupting a live network of connected services


• Automation: Organizations must automate as much of the runtime governance as possible to achieve 24x7 efficiencies and avoid reliance on manual tasks


• Cross-Platform: To be effective, SOA governance must fully leverage the native capabilities of the platforms on which application components run

In response to ongoing feedback from its industry-leading roster of customers, AmberPoint has introduced new capabilities in each of these areas.

Greater Visibility: SOA Explorer™
AmberPoint release 6 delivers enterprise-wide SOA visibility through its new SOA Explorer user interface. AmberPoint leverages Adobe® Flex™ and AJAX to provide a graphically rich, interactive experience that enables users to gain bird's eye views of their entire SOA networks, monitor operational status, and rapidly identify and drill-down into areas of interest.

• Graphical views of the network topology that are color-coded to reflect real-time operational data


• Tabular views for comparative analysis and planning with support for sorting, searching and exporting data


• Extensive filtering based on runtime metadata—such as failed services, application components with performance issues, rogue or unsecured services, or all services within a particular application group


• Drill-downs to diagnose problems or take corrective actions

"AmberPoint has made innovative use of Adobe Flex in the latest release of its SOA runtime governance software," said Steve Rotter, director of product marketing at Adobe. "The interactivity and rich user experience provided by Flex will enable AmberPoint customers to gain greater visibility and control of their complex services-based environments. We're excited to see our technology applied to business-critical solutions such as AmberPoint's offerings."

Enhanced Control: Throttling Policies to Regulate Use
The new release of AmberPoint monitors system load and can automatically regulate requests based on such criteria as response times, request rates, fault rates, etc. This enables organizations to moderate the flow of traffic from various users and applications based on business criteria. For example, at times of peak load, update requests can continue unthrottled while search requests are kept in check.

In addition, AmberPoint's throttling policies help to address one of the thorniest problems when exposing legacy systems through SOA interfaces—runaway demand. AmberPoint protects application performance without requiring constant monitoring or manual intervention.

In other news related to automating control of SOA systems, AmberPoint also announced today that it has extended its agentless policy enforcement to include security policies for BEA WebLogic 9.2 (see "AmberPoint Expands Agentless Policy Enforcement to Include SOA Security Capabilities”).

Maintaining Control: Validation of Business Applications
In addition to working with individual services, AmberPoint SOA Validation System now validates business applications using transactions that span multiple services. By using complete transaction flows, it detects potential runtime anomalies that might result from ongoing changes to the production environment. By providing better, more complete analysis, AmberPoint reduces the risks system change poses to production SOA environments.

Simplified Automation: Scriptable Command Line Interface
To succeed with SOA, organizations must automate as much day-to-day management and control as possible. To accommodate automated lifecycle processes, AmberPoint’s runtime governance capabilities are now accessible from scripting tools, such as Ant, PERL and shell scripts. This powerful capability makes it much easier to automate runtime governance and significantly reduces the burden on corporate IT staff.

• Callable from home-grown build, rollout and deployment scripts


• Integrates with other IT tools that can use scripts, such as system management products and interactive development environments

Expanded Platform Support
AmberPoint has established unmatched partnerships with the leading SOA platform providers. As a result of these collaborations, AmberPoint SOA runtime governance solutions support an impressive list of platforms including industry leading enterprise service buses (ESBs). AmberPoint now offers support for:

• BEA AquaLogic Service Bus


• IBM WebSphere ESB


• JMS-based messaging systems such as IBM MQ Series and TIBCO EMS


• JBoss

Combined with the new capabilities provided by SOA Explorer, this enhanced platform support greatly expands both the breadth and the depth of AmberPoint's industry-leading SOA visibility.

"We're seeing increasingly powerful SOA systems in place at our customer sites," said John Hubinger, AmberPoint CEO. "Our customers now have more services, greater reuse, higher transaction volumes and greater complexity, so their need for runtime governance is greater as well. In response to ongoing feedback, we continue to make product enhancements that bring greater visibility and control to customers at the vanguard of SOA."

Availability and Pricing
The new release of AmberPoint will be available in the next 60 days. Pricing begins at $25,000.

About AmberPoint
AmberPoint is the industry's leading provider of SOA runtime governance solutions. More than 100 customers, including Best Buy, H&R Block, MedicAlert Foundation, 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, or visit www.amberpoint.com for a complimentary developer's edition of AmberPoint software.

Press Contacts:

Jennifer Olson
Atomic Public Relations
415.402.0230
jennifer(at)atomicpr.com