New Management Challenges

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) delivers a more flexible application framework, one that breaks monolithic applications into distributed components. From a business standpoint, SOA enables low-cost integration of disparate business systems—both within and beyond the firewall—thereby enabling real-time systems that allow enterprises to rapidly exploit new business channels.

However, these gains in architectural and business flexibility are accompanied by a marked increase in the complexity of the resultant software system. With services-based applications, organizations face a multitude of software entities "talking" to others, creating a live, dynamic network of interdependent services.

SOA-based applications can be composites of disparate application code. Some Web services are built on .NET, some on Java and others from legacy assets. They can include components you don't own or control. There are Web services built by other departments, ones available via packaged applications and others published by partners or external service providers. That means they can change or fail independently and without the ability to customize, alter or repair them.

SOA systems evolve quickly, growing in scale and complexity as new versions are published, additional applications are woven into the SOA landscape and new customers and partners participate. A change to any Web service can set in motion a ripple-effect across the entire network, potentially crippling an entire system.

Gaining visibility into and control of this de-centralized production system is critical to success with SOA.

AmberPoint SOA Management System™

AmberPoint meets the challenges brought forth by SOA. It transforms services-based systems into production-ready business assets by making them easy to monitor and manage, more secure and easy to upgrade.

With AmberPoint, enterprises implementing services-based applications can realize the full potential of their flexible, standards-based systems. They can better understand system behavior and implement policies that automate performance management, remedy exceptional conditions and uphold security. Significantly, they can do all this without special coding to the services or message tags. AmberPoint’s non-invasive, agent-based architecture allows SOA systems to evolve and grow without constant recoding to system components.

AmberPoint SOA Management System is the industry's most comprehensive runtime governance solution. We cover its capabilities, features and benefits in the following sections: