AmberPoint Flex-ing SOA management muscles

AmberPoint will add an Adobe Flex-based interface to its SOA management platform, with the goal of giving users a bird's eye view of their SOA networks

The company on Monday is announcing the release of Version 6 of AmberPoint SOA Management System and AmberPoint SOA Validation System. As part of Management System, AmberPoint will feature SOA Explorer, which provides a graphical, interactive view of SOA networks. SOA leverages Adobe's Flex and Flash technologies as well as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). 

With SOA Explorer, users can monitor operational status and drill down on areas of interest. Filtering of information gives users a more manageable amount of information to digest. Without this capability, "you can see so much information that it's overwhelming," said Ed Horst, AmberPoint vice president of marketing.

Capabilities in the new product release reflect the growth in SOA that AmberPoint is experiencing, Horst said. "This release is kind of an outgrowth of the kind of apps we're seeing in our installed base," he said.

"We now have some customers with well over 1,000 components," in their SOA, Horst said. Some customers are processing millions of transactions per day, he added.

"With that comes effectively a pretty complex environment to govern at run time. That's our business," Horst said.

AmberPoint focuses on visibility into an SOA as well as control and validation, Horst said. He described validation as keeping things in order after changes are made.

Also featured in the new AmberPoint platform is automatic throttling, to set limits on service usage, Horst said. The computer machine interface in AmberPoint, meanwhile, now supports scripting for capabilities such as performing automatic backups. Scripting technologies such as Ant and Perl are supported.

An analyst weighed AmberPoint against rival Actional. AmberPoint has an edge over Actional in the area of visual effects, although Actional covers more messaging protocols, said analyst Anne Thomas Manes, vice president of Burton Group.

"The thing that I think AmberPoint does really [well] is the visualization particularly from the business perspective and I think that's the edge that AmberPoint has over Actional at this point," Manes said. SOA Validation System, meanwhile, now validates business applications using transactions that span multiple services. Potential runtime anomalies are detected.

Pricing for either SOA Management System or SOA Validation System starts at $25,000. AmberPoint 6 ships in 60 days.