At its recent customer conference, Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) introduced new solutions in a bid to tackle Web services management.
The solutions, which fall under Islandia, N.Y.-based CA’s Unicenter and eTrust brands, are to cover the performance, reliability and security management aspects of enterprise and customer-facing Web services.
During a press briefing at the CA World conference in Las Vegas, Don LeClair, divisional vice-president with CA’s office of the CTO, said the new offerings will focus on managing Web services from a business process level. CA hopes to “provide visibility and accountability to that level, “as well as ” increase enterprise responsiveness,” he added.
Nick Gall, senior vice-president and principal analyst with research firm Meta Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn., talked about what the industry needs in order for Web services to continue moving forward. “Web services are reaching ubiquity,” Gall said – because they are a “simple, yet effective means of integrating existing applications.”
Ideally, the focus of Web services should be on interoperability and the flexibility to work with a customer’s existing infrastructure, without the need to “rip and replace” with totally different products, Gall said.
Federation, or the ability of Web services to “work across technological, management, security and business boundaries,” is also key, Gall noted. At this time, he added, Web services mostly address business architecture needs, but what is needed is a more overarching approach where management and security-related architecture is also top of mind.
Dmitri Tcherevik said that in the security space, management products “have traditionally been focused on transport security,” or pro