AmberPoint Delivers Enhanced SOA Dashboard and Visualization Capabilities, Brings Valuable New Insight to Management of SOA Systems

SOA Management Leader Delivers New Visibility into and Analysis of Performance and Availability, Exception Handling and Security for Web Services Systems

Oakland, California, March 28, 2005 -- AmberPoint, the leading provider of SOA management software, announced today the new, enhanced dashboard capabilities of its solutions. AmberPoint’s new dashboards are completely customizable, foster a better understanding of the system, and enable users to more precisely pinpoint trouble areas. AmberPoint’s new dashboard capabilities, which enable companies to more easily manage the growing complexity of their service-oriented systems, are now available with the current AmberPoint offering.

“As we add more business applications on our SOA, our need for insight into the system increases,” said Toby Redshaw, corporate vice president of IT Strategy, Architecture and eBusiness, Motorola. “AmberPoint has addressed these requirements with useful new features that help to reduce system complexity and keep us better apprised of our SOA landscape. We can customize the dashboards to suit our needs and limit access based on user role.”

Broader Range of System Data
AmberPoint is able to pull data from a broader range of systems than was previously possible. AmberPoint can take information from registries, other management systems and any variety of Web services.

Integrated with UDDI Registries: AmberPoint integrates with industry-standard UDDI registries from various vendors and can pull data from multiple registries. It automatically detects changes in the registry and updates the management system as required. AmberPoint can also publish quality-of-service data to a registry, enabling system users to choose services based on performance criteria.

Dependency Tracking: Helping to reduce system complexity, AmberPoint automatically discovers services and displays interdependencies across service-oriented systems. AmberPoint dashboards depict these services graphically, helping organizations to understand the impact of system changes and to better perform root-cause analysis.

Advanced Analysis and Search Capabilities: AmberPoint’s flexible new dashboards have querying capabilities that improve the user’s ability to find information on specific services, operations, customers, alerts and agreements. Users can search for management entities (services, customers, agreements, alerts, containers, etc.) by a number of relevant criteria, including:

• Services meeting QoS objectives, violating QoS objectives, alive, down, not being monitored, version number, containing the name, etc.


• Customers of a type (e.g., platinum customers), meeting QoS objectives, not meeting QoS objectives, containing the name, etc.


• Agreements assigned to specific customers, not assigned to any customer, assigned to a type of customer, meeting all objectives, in violation of objectives, with a name containing, etc.


• Alerts related to service targets, agreement objectives, system errors, etc.


• Containers in lifecycle phase (development, production, testing, etc.), of vendor type, of OS type, new to the system, with discovery errors, containing the name, etc.


• Date and time of deployment


• Date and time of last change

“AmberPoint's new dashboard capabilities will help organizations quickly gauge the health of their increasingly complex and critical SOA environments,” said Tom Rhinelander, analyst with New Rowley Group. “IT and business managers will rely on customized, visual, and no-installation-required SOA dashboards to be alerted to, analyze, and respond to service anomalies—such as exceptions, SLA breeches or transaction failures—before they cause significant harm.”

Richer Presentation of SOA System Data
AmberPoint customers benefit from easy-to-understand, easily customizable dashboards.

Web-based and Real Time: AmberPoint takes an innovative approach to its dashboards, combining the best of both web-based and desktop-based applications. AmberPoint’s solutions are web-based in order to eliminate the need to pre-install and maintain client software. And yet, all graphs are real time and interactive, allowing instant updates of critical information and the rich interactions from float-over and clickable elements.

Industry-leading Ease of Use: AmberPoint’s newest SOA solutions maximize ease of use by providing solutions that are:

• Clickable: Users simply click on any interesting element to get more detailed information or to drill down into the topic.


• Customizable: Users can fine-tune the level of detail and specific information on each portlet.


• Color Coded: AmberPoint dashboards use colors to highlight problem areas, requested alerts, target thresholds, etc. This allows users to quickly scan the dashboards while looking for the areas of greatest interest.

Customizable Management and Security Dashboards: AmberPoint solutions offer a user-configurable layout along with collapsible menus to optimize screen real estate for the tasks at hand.

• Summary Views: Summary charts succinctly display data from multiple operations at once.


• Customizable Portal Layout: AmberPoint now offers user-defined portlets that can include feeds from external sources, such as web applications and web pages.


• Role-based Access: AmberPoint provides role-based views of management data and access limits to match different classes of users.


• Security Dashboards: Users can fine tune security dashboards to contain interesting security events such as number of failed logins, encrypted messages, signature checks, etc.


• Color Coding and Iconic Representation: Pinpoint problem areas with new, easy-to-discern, graphical representation of system components.

“As we’ve seen at many customers sites, organizations implementing SOAs have a greater need to quickly understand system behavior and easily implement management policies based on their analysis,” said Paul Butterworth, AmberPoint’s Chief Technology Officer. “Our new dashboards provide the flexibility these companies require to gain visibility into their loosely coupled systems and look at management data the way they prefer to see it.”

About AmberPoint
AmberPoint is the leading provider of management software for service-oriented architectures (SOA). With its modular, distributed architecture, AmberPoint radically simplifies the management and evolution of service-based business solutions. For more information, contact AmberPoint at 510.663.6300 or info@amberpoint.com, or visit the company website at www.amberpoint.com for a complimentary developer's edition of AmberPoint software.

Press Contacts:

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

Kim Abreu
Atomic Public Relations
415.439.4205
kim@atomicpr.com