News

CA move allows Web services to come of age: DataPower CTO

• By Rich Seeley
• December 10, 2003

The era when Web services applications were 'toy pilot projects' managed with tools from start-up vendors is over, contends Eugene Kuznetsov, chairman and CTO at DataPower Technology Inc., Cambridge, Mass.

The new era of ''complex, real-world XML Web services'' is marked by Computer Associates' (CA's) announcement this week of general availability for its Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) product, he argued. CA is partnering with Kuznetsov's company to incorporate DataPower's hardware security and performance monitoring technology into the Unicenter WSDM system.

DataPower XML-Aware Network (XAN) infrastructure technology for monitoring performance, security and reliability of Web services will fit into the Unicenter WSDM management framework.

''It makes a lot of sense to use our wire-speed proxy doing traffic inspection and policy enforcement, and your existing, very sophisticated, very complex, very intelligent Unicenter management system to manage this new class of network traffic called XML Web services,'' Kuznetsov said.

But all the sophisticated monitoring technology is part of a larger change in Web services applications in his opinion. ''Part of what this enables and part of what this is driven by is much more complex Web services rollouts,'' Kuznetsov said. ''Not just toy pilot projects, but real-world Web services where you have performance requirements, reliability requirements and very stringent security requirements.''

With large vendors like CA -- which has also partnered with Microsoft and BEA in its new Unicenter offering -- Kuznetsov argues that the Web services market has matured.

''The big story here is that you're now starting to see a move away from the tightly coupled, non-standard-based stovepipe Web services management applications offered by start-ups,'' he said. ''Now you're seeing the space mature. You see a move away from these highly verticalized products. Instead, you see Web services management becoming part of overall systems and security management.''