AmberPoint Announces New Management System with Enhanced End-to-End Capabilities

AmberPoint Extends Management to Support HTML and Processes; Includes New Capabilities for Calendaring, Visual Policy Creation and Enhanced Performance

Oakland, California, February 9, 2004 -- AmberPoint, Inc. announced today a new release of its Web services management system, AmberPoint 4.0, with support for Web traffic and processes, as well as new features including calendaring support, graphical specification of management policies, and new options for out-of-band processing. AmberPoint 4.0 represents major enhancements across all AmberPoint product families: Service Level Manager, Exception Manager and AmberPoint Management Foundation. Each of the AmberPoint enhancements are in direct response to requirements generated from customer implementations and regular discussions with the company’s Customer Advisory Board.

“The new features and capabilities of AmberPoint 4.0 address real-world Web service management issues, such as the need to incorporate Web application traffic and to fine-tune service-level agreement policies," said Tom Rhinelander, analyst with New Rowley Group. "These customer-driven changes reflect how Web services and Web service management tools are evolving from conceptual to critical solutions.”

AmberPoint solutions offer a uniquely non-invasive approach for managing distributed, heterogeneous service-oriented systems. AmberPoint integrates into any Web services environment, quickly delivering comprehensive management, monitoring and security capabilities without requiring additional coding to the Web services themselves. AmberPoint is the first Web services management vendor with solutions that run natively in both .NET and Java, enabling its software products to fully leverage the advantages of both prevailing Web services platforms.

“We've seen that today's Web services-based systems often include an array of transports and protocols,” said Roy Singham, president of ThoughtWorks, an industry-leading systems integrator. “AmberPoint 4.0 brings new management capabilities that are in synch with the evolving needs of organizations deploying Web services in such complex, heterogeneous environments.”

AmberPoint 4.0 Enhancements
AmberPoint 4.0 brings significant benefits to AmberPoint customers, including end-to-end visibility and rapid specification and re-use of management policies, down to the Web service operation level.

Web Traffic Support: AmberPoint management solutions now provide visibility into the Web traffic (HTML/HTTP) that is part of many Web service systems. Interactions for these systems often start with HTML-based front-ends, such as portals, e-commerce systems and websites.

• Customers can now achieve end-to-end visibility across heterogeneous systems, including non-WSDL Web services, non-SOAP XML, HTML, Java servlets and JSPs.

Management across Processes: With its non-invasive approach, AmberPoint 4.0 solutions provide comprehensive management capabilities across processes, including multiple process engines.

• Delivers visibility from start to finish, not just individual services


• Matches customer needs for system and business data

Business Agreement Calendaring: AmberPoint customers are now able to easily establish time-aware service level management policies that match the sophistication of real-world business agreements.

• A rich set of out-of-the-box calendaring options for tracking and optimizing service levels around peak hours, the official work week, and scheduled downtime


• Sophisticated management of users spanning multiple time zones


• Greater ability to identify trends and predict system problems

Graphical Policy Designer: AmberPoint introduces a new approach for designing and enforcing custom management policies for Web services. With AmberPoint’s new Graphical Policy Designer, customers now have a faster, easier way to build the management patterns they most often use and re-use.

• Point-and-click definition of the most common management actions: Security, versioning, load balancing, failover, message transformations, and content-based routing


• Ability to more easily and flexibly administer the system by exporting, moving and centralizing policy configurations


• Default dashboards for monitoring the runtime behavior of each policy in an easy-to-understand, visual fashion

Enhanced System Performance: With this release, AmberPoint also delivers new opportunities to optimize system performance. Its new T-Filters perform out-of-band processing of Web services management tasks.

• Ultra-low overhead provides management for high-throughput environments


• Customers can mix and match T-Filters with intermediary agents to create topologies best suited to their Web services networks.

“AmberPoint continues to evolve and advance its solutions to meet real-world requirements,” said Kevin Poulter, chief architect at British American Tobacco. “The enhancements in AmberPoint 4.0 bring significant new capabilities, extending the breadth of the components over which we have control. The feedback AmberPoint receives from customers has quickly and consistently translated into innovative new technology that’s improving the benefits we derive from our Web services systems.”

“AmberPoint 4.0 brings significant new opportunities to raise the performance and ease the administration of complex Web services systems,” said Paul Butterworth CTO at AmberPoint. “We’ve established a number of resources for gaining input from our customers, and we use that feedback to help drive our product engineering efforts. Our ongoing product improvements help to ensure that our customers have all the capabilities they need to be successful with Web services.”

In related news, AmberPoint recently announced a number of marquee new customers and a reseller agreement with IBM Global Services (see “ AmberPoint Extends Market Leadership with Marquee New Customers and Strategic Relationships,” January 14, 2003.)

Availability
AmberPoint 4.0 will ship later this month.

Press Contacts:

Bob Dever
AmberPoint, Inc.
510.433.6553
bdever@amberpoint.com

Kim Abreu
Atomic Public Relations
415.439.4205
kim@atomicpr.com