IBM Tuesday announced two new Rational development tools and an upgraded Tivoli application management offering, which the company says will let users expand the quality of services in a service-oriented architecture.
The two new Rational tools and enhanced Tivoli software can be used to automate the testing of Web services within an SOA and ensure that the SOA functions as it was designed to without interfering with the rest of a company's IT infrastructure, said Sandy Carter, IBM's vice president of marketing and strategy for SOA and WebSphere.
"This concept of quality management is not just about testing but about end-to-end processes that work to make sure business requirements are implemented," Carter said. "It is expected that the services will change, that new services will be added in. You may be looking at a service that is being changed in a way that wasn't anticipated."
The new tools include IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality, which tests the functionality of Web-services-based applications, and IBM Rational Performance Tester Extension for SOA Quality, which can boost the performance of services-based applications for scalability.
Both Rational tools will be available March 27.
IBM has also enhanced its Tivoli Composite Application Manager with new response time and application management dashboards to measure services' availability, performance and content.
The Tivoli tool will be available in the second quarter of this year.