Tools promise to extend Web Services

Blue Titan Software and Digital Evolution are rolling out new products this week to meet a growing IT demand for infrastructure to support extending early departmental Web services deployments to the enterprise.

At the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit in Orlando, Blue Titan plans bring out a reliable messaging package to add to its service-oriented architecture infrastructure offering; Digital Evolution will unveil an XML virtual private network (VPN) that can secure Web services.

The new Blue Titan Network Director RM will offer guaranteed delivery, prioritized delivery and store-and-forward messaging so users won't have to hard code this functionality, said Chris Schin, director of product marketing at the company. The software also supports the proposed WS-Reliable Messaging standard, he said.

Accredited Home Lenders Holding is using Network Director to provide centralized management and security for the millions of Web services calls it has gathered in the past year, said Mike McCoy, director of enterprise architecture at the US mortgage company. "We wanted to allow developers to develop solutions without having to think about ... maintenance, high availability or reliability," he said.

Once the reliable messaging standard is approved by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, McCoy said his company can broaden its Web services architecture. He declined to provide details.

Blue Titan's new product will allow companies to obtain message queuing without having to purchase messaging software from IBM or Sonic Software, said Anne Thomas Manes, an analyst at Burton Group. "When you're doing Web services, you don't want to rely on transactions; you want some kind of guarantee that the transaction is complete," she said.

Digital Evolution's new XML VPN appliance securely extends XML and Web services-based application interfaces so a company can expose its Web services to partners, company executives said. The VPN provides security, auditing, provisioning and policy enforcement, said Eric Pulier, founder and chairman of Digital Evolution.

"You want to be able to monitor the messages in flight, to process them and look at the payload," Pulier said

The XML VPN will secure content at the application level, as opposed to IP-based VPNs that provide network-level security, said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink. IP-based VPNs can secure the packets while unknowingly letting malicious content into the network, he said.