About TransCanada
TransCanada recognized the need for a core set of services that its IT departments could use and re-use to build business-specific Web services. Critical to this infrastructure were key management functions, including metering and monitoring, reporting, notification and alerts, failover and logging. TransCanada selected AmberPoint for these capabilities because the AmberPoint architecture fits well in TransCanada’s IT environment, and its non-invasive approach and ability to leverage the content of XML messages enable it to manage any new or existing application exposing an XML-over-HTTP interface without requiring code changes to the Web services themselves.
“The interoperable and non-invasive management provided by AmberPoint empowers our IT department to better meet our service level agreements with internal and external customers as our adoption of Web services gains momentum,” said Martin Vant Erve, TransCanada’s Web services architect. “It gives us the opportunity to have consistency across the enterprise in how we handle Web services management tasks such as metering, monitoring, failover and notification, where traditionally service management was implemented in a platform-specific manner, or not implemented at all.”
AmberPoint enables TransCanada to oversee and act upon the overall operational health of its Web services environment. TransCanada uses three easily customizable AmberPoint dashboards to see real-time information on system performance and availability. AmberPoint also plays an active role in system operation, monitoring XML messages for application- and system-level faults and automatically providing system failover to back-up Web services if an error is deemed critical.
“Managing a group of distributed Web services is key to solving infrastructure issues quickly and easily,” said Richard Bloemhoef, leader of middleware infrastructure operations at TransCanada. “AmberPoint’s distributed solution delivers monitoring and management in a scaleable and easily reconfigurable fashion. It plays an active role in managing our Web services, automating formerly manual tasks, such as failover.”
TransCanada’s initial deployment of AmberPoint is for its Distribution List Service (DLS), which enables TransCanada staff and applications to look up organizational information and send messages to a variety of groups and individuals through different delivery mechanisms. DLS can be used by different applications at TransCanada to provide message distribution, thus eliminating duplicated messaging functionality and allowing applications to focus on core business requirements. TransCanada is next using AmberPoint with its “Cortex” project, an interoperable message queue service.
AmberPoint integrated quickly and easily into TransCanada’s SunTM Open Network Environment (Sun ONE) IT landscape. “Sun and AmberPoint form a powerful combination for building and deploying enterprise-grade Web services,” said Mark Herring, senior director of marketing, Sun ONE Java Web services and tools at Sun. “Using Sun ONE, TransCanada developed a robust service-oriented architecture that leverages Web services to speed application integration. By integrating AmberPoint’s comprehensive management capabilities into its framework, TransCanada is able to ensure the reliability, availability and performance of those Web services.”
“TransCanada’s implementation of AmberPoint Management Foundation is an excellent example of the value we bring to enterprise Web services environments,” said John Hubinger, AmberPoint president and CEO. “AmberPoint has helped TransCanada overcome the major challenges associated with deploying Web services reliably. We filled-out their Web services infrastructure by providing the management components they needed to build and deploy effective, production-ready Web services.”
Management Capabilities Provided by AmberPoint
AmberPoint Management Foundation provides several significant management capabilities:
TransCanada is a leading North American energy company. It is focused on natural gas transmission and power services with employees who are expert in these businesses. The company's network of approximately 38,000 kilometers of pipeline transports the majority of western Canada's natural gas production to the fastest growing markets in Canada and the United States. TransCanada owns, controls or is constructing a total of approximately 2,650 megawatts of power -- an amount of power that can meet the needs of more than 2.5 million average households. The company's common shares trade under the symbol TRP on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges.
Press Contacts:
AmberPoint, Inc.
510-433-6553
bdever@amberpoint.com
Kim Abreu
Atomic Public Relations
415.703.9454
kim@atomicpr.com
