CA Ships Web-Services Management Tools

Computer Associates on Monday shipped its first Web-services management products and unveiled several related partnerships, marking a significant shift in a market dominated by small companies and startups.

Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management tracks application performance, notifying system administrators when predetermined levels aren't met. The product monitors software interfaces built according to Web services standards.

Unicenter WSDM stems from CA's acquisition in the summer of Adjoin. Earlier this year, rival Hewlett-Packard acquired Web-services management startup Talking Blocks. IBM, the third major vendor in the system-management space, has yet to release a product roadmap.

"IBM is still sort of struggling with getting the Tivoli (product) group in line with the overall software effort," says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at market researcher ZapThink LLC. "But IBM is "definitely talking about Web-services management."

Although the three big vendors are following startups such as Actional, AmberPoint, and Confluent in the Web-services management space, the market is still young. That means there's plenty of time for the major players to build more capabilities into their product lines.

"Time is on the side of these large management vendors," ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer says. "As time goes on, and (Web services) management features become more and more required, the large vendors will increasingly catch up. The startups have a window of opportunity of at most another two years."

Those small companies that aren't acquired will have to find a market niche to survive, Schmelzer says.

CA's management tools use embedded code within application servers to monitor messages, based on XML, sent between Web-services applications. The software monitors communication speeds and watches for failures in completing tasks, passing on the data to Unicenter's overall monitoring console, which also tracks the performance of hardware such as servers and storage devices, and application infrastructure software.

As the adoption of Web services accelerates, it will become more important to add monitoring tools as part of an overall IT management system. "You need to have that visibility. Otherwise, you're creating more work for the poor guy in the data center that has to track down problems," Schmelzer says. "At some point, this all has to be pulled together."

CA says a number of companies have agreed to support the product, including BEA Systems, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, open-source application server maker JBoss Group, business-process integration software maker Collaxa, DataPower, which makes tools for accelerating XML-based message traffic; and tools vendor Systinet.

CA says it intends to support the Web Services Distributed Management specification under development by Oasis, an international standards body, that's scheduled for release early next year. Products supporting the WSDM spec would be able to share monitoring and performance data without custom coding.