Over the coming months, AmberPoint will introduce additional products to further extend the power of its management solutions.
AmberPoint is working with leading insurance company MetLife and prominent North American energy company TransCanada, among other early implementers, to increase the business value of their Web services, and is well-positioned through partnerships with IBM, Sun and several Web services systems integrators.
While major platform vendors aggressively advocate Web services – a market Gartner Group projects will reach $28 billion by 2005* – existing Web services products do not adequately address core enterprise requirements such as access control, performance monitoring and manageability. AmberPoint Management Foundation meets these market needs by enabling organizations to effectively deploy, utilize and manage production-level Web services environments.
"As enterprise adoption of Web services increases and extends across company boundaries, issues such as reliability, security and performance become crucial," said Tyler McDaniel, a director at leading research and consulting firm Hurwitz Group. "Currently, few solutions address these issues, opening a window of opportunity for suppliers. AmberPoint enables organizations to realize the promise of Web services, turning loosely coupled XML Web applications into productive business assets."
Open, Flexible Architecture Creates Non-Invasive Solution
AmberPoint’s patent-pending solutions are delivered as standards-based software modules that can be installed non-invasively into any existing Web services environment. Unlike other approaches, this non-invasive approach to Web services enables developers to code to existing frameworks and class libraries. AmberPoint supports both Java-based and Microsoft .Net platforms, architectures and industry standards, giving customers maximum flexibility in their selection of Web service solutions.
Leveraging Business Content for Richer Management Solutions
AmberPoint has pioneered an inventive new approach to managing XML service applications. By basing management capabilities on the business content of user interactions, as well as traditional operations information, AmberPoint Management Foundation enables organizations to better understand the up-to-the-minute status of their business activities.
Only AmberPoint is able to provide selective visibility into any combination of context (such as identity of user or time of day) and business content (such as number of units ordered or selected shipping method). And only AmberPoint enables a business analyst to see an automatically generated list of targeted business activities or even a summary of those activities displayed in real business time as metrics on an activity dashboard. This responsiveness enables organizations to easily evaluate fast-breaking business initiatives, such as new product promotions, and therefore more effectively manage both their systems and the impact of their business activities.
Security is another management function that is greatly enhanced by AmberPoint’s ability to leverage business content. Traditional security solutions place strict controls on the identity of the user but have less power to restrict user access to data based on the value of that data. AmberPoint can limit Web service content to the information that users have permission to view. For example, an AmberPoint-enabled Web service might allow a human resources manager to access the compensation information for only employees earning lower salaries. No other Web service management solution offers such capabilities.
MetLife and TransCanada
AmberPoint’s early implementations with major companies in the insurance and energy industries demonstrate the company’s value and the urgency of the market need.
"MetLife already drives critical business processes through Web service systems and is looking to further expand them,” said Jim August, vice president of eBusiness Infrastructure, Institutional Systems at MetLife. “We must ensure that these Web service systems meet our traditional service-level requirements. We’ve installed AmberPoint to help us manage to those requirements. From what we’ve seen, AmberPoint is solving the hard problems associated with Web services.”
“TransCanada has benefited from using some of the latest Internet technologies. Our use of XML and Web services is one of the most recent,” said Jim Brignall, information systems director of Operations and Engineering at TransCanada. “The strength of the AmberPoint management team alone got us interested. As we looked at their products, we saw that they address many of our issues around production use of Web services. AmberPoint’s management products installed quickly and were immediately able to work with our Web services. The direction of this initial product and their future solutions seem to be right in line with our needs.”
Strong Industry Partnerships
Its open architecture and unique approach to Web services management have enabled AmberPoint to form strong alliances with other Web services industry leaders.
AmberPoint has a strong partnership with IBM. “IBM and AmberPoint are helping organizations to implement Web services that meet demanding enterprise requirements,” said Don Ferguson, IBM fellow and chief architect, IBM WebSphere Platform. “AmberPoint extends the rich capabilities of WebSphere, providing management, tracking and security features to Web services deployed on our industry-leading e-business platform.”
AmberPoint is also working closely with Sun. “Sun’s commitment to making Sun ONE the preferred platform for enterprise-class Web services is a perfect match for AmberPoint’s products,” said Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of software at Sun. “The partnership of Sun with its Java platform and AmberPoint with its strong background in distributed systems will help customers tackle some of the tough problems in managing Web services.”
Other AmberPoint partners include Bold Tech Systems, Class I.Q., Connect Systems, InSync Information Systems, IonIdea, Kuvera, Netegrity, Perficient, Relational Options, TechSpan and ThoughtWorks.
AmberPoint Products
The Management Foundation provides extensive management, tracking and security capabilities:
World-Class Team Brings Industry Expertise
AmberPoint’s founding team has a proven track record at building, delivering and supporting enterprise software for successful companies, including Sun, Forte Software, webMethods, Oracle, Ingres and Sybase.
“We’re tackling a mission-critical area in Web services,” said John Hubinger, founder and CEO of AmberPoint. “Our development, services and executive teams’ world-class backgrounds in distributed systems, databases, development tools and management frameworks has enabled us to create products that make Web services work for real-world business, quickly, easily and independently of software architecture.”
About AmberPoint
AmberPoint, Inc., a pioneer in Web services management, offers the most comprehensive solutions for making Web services production-ready, business-ready and easily manageable. With its modular, architecture-independent design, AmberPoint radically simplifies the management and evolution of business solutions built on Web services. AmberPoint’s Customer Experience Group delivers services to ensure successful deployment and use of all AmberPoint solutions. Founded in 2001, AmberPoint is privately held with venture backing from Sutter Hill Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. AmberPoint corporate headquarters are located in Oakland, California. For more information, contact AmberPoint at 510-663-6300 or www.amberpoint.com.
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* Source: Gartner report “Web Services Solutions: A Potential $28 Billion Market,” 28 February 2002
Press Contacts:
AmberPoint, Inc.
510-433-6553
bdever@amberpoint.com
Kim Abreu
Atomic Public Relations
415.703.9454
kim@atomicpr.com
