AmberPoint Announces New System Release with Enhanced Capabilities for Larger Scale Service-Oriented Applications.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Management Leader Addresses the Growing Complexity and Scale of Service-Oriented Systems

AmberPoint, Inc. announced today a new release of its industry-leading software for managing service-oriented architectures comprised of Web services and other components. AmberPoint's latest release delivers valuable new capabilities to meet rapidly advancing customer requirements for managing greater complexity, enhancing reliability and handling greater scalability as their service-oriented systems grow. The new release of AmberPoint represents significant enhancements across all AmberPoint solutions: Service Level Manager, Exception Manager and AmberPoint Management Foundation.

"Our move to a real-time enterprise is accelerating the need for event-driven interfaces between systems," said John Schmidt, IS Leader at Best Buy. "As these loosely coupled systems become more widespread, we require additional means of managing them, understanding the dependencies among system components and handling increased traffic. With its new release, AmberPoint is addressing such requirements to help ensure that our systems are reliable business assets."

The new release of AmberPoint addresses additional requirements of enterprise-wide applications running across service oriented architectures (SOA). For example, AmberPoint now supports real-time management of thousands of active service level agreements across multiple customers and services. To reduce complexity, it automatically discovers services and displays interdependencies across service-oriented systems. To ensure optimal availability and performance of the management layer, AmberPoint has introduced the industry's first recoverable services management system.

"AmberPoint continues to strengthen its product suite to meet customer requirements," said Simon Walker, Web services development manager, British Telecommunications Plc. "With its latest release, AmberPoint is delivering capabilities that are important to larger-scale enterprise deployments. The enhancements in AmberPoint will simplify the work of managing and maintaining rapidly growing service oriented environments."

"As our service-oriented systems continue to grow, we need better ways to manage the mounting complexity of these distributed systems," said Toby Redshaw, corporate vice president of IT Strategy Architecture and eBusiness, Motorola. "This elevates the role of the management layer. AmberPoint's new release will enable us to better manage our progressively more sophisticated services-oriented environment and to manage service levels effectively in the face of significant increases to the number of active connections."

"Whereas a year ago the services-based applications we were called on to manage often had only a dozen services and up to a hundred service agreements, this year it has changed radically," said Gordon Loudon, vice president of Customer Support and Services, AmberPoint. "This year our customers are rolling-out systems with thousands of endpoints and thousands of active service agreements. And we're seeing this sort of increase in complexity across a variety of industries, including retail, telecommunications, manufacturing and insurance."

This new release builds on earlier releases of AmberPoint that greatly expanded the types of SOA software and hardware components that can be managed using AmberPoint, including both SOAP and non-SOAP XML, HTML Web pages, hardware switches and blade servers.

Managing Application Complexity

AmberPoint enables the Operations staff to more easily track services throughout the system. Additionally, AmberPoint uses a patent-pending message fingerprinting technology to discover service interdependencies across platforms (language, application server and operating system) throughout the enterprise.

--Automated service discovery

--Automated discovery and graphical representation of service interdependencies

--Dynamic assignment of service level agreements and performance targets

--Graphical representation of services network

--Virtualization of services: Hides users and dependent services from changes and rearrangements of service definitions.

--Visualization of exceptions: graphical representation for root cause analysis

Managing the Management System

The reliability of the management system itself is critical to the success of Web services-driven business initiatives. AmberPoint has introduced new capabilities that ensure optimal reliability and performance from the management system.

--Recoverable management system: AmberPoint can automatically rebuild its critical management information in case of disk failure.

--No single point of failure: There is no single point of failure than can disable processing of a service.

Massive Scalability

AmberPoint supports high transaction volumes, handling thousands of active service level agreements across multiple customers and services. AmberPoint has also streamlined the user experience for customers with higher transaction volumes by simplifying the creation of policies and allowing for simpler, hierarchical categorization of QoS data. Additional new scalability features include:

--Baselining: Users can set service levels and thresholds based on averages and relative variances, which are automatically tabulated by AmberPoint.

--Data model optimization: The methods for writing, reading and storing data are optimized for different data models

"From working closely with our customers, we've seen firsthand their evolving requirements for management, and we release new products to stay ahead of those market needs," said Paul Butterworth, AmberPoint CTO. "The architectural underpinnings of our management platform remove the burden of implementing our product upgrades. Our customers can add new management capabilities such as interdependency tracking without having to recode their services."

Related News

In other news today, AmberPoint announced the close of an $8.2 million funding round (see related release, "AmberPoint Secures $8.2 Million in Third-Round Funding").

About AmberPoint

AmberPoint is the leading provider of management software for service-oriented architectures (SOA). With its modular, distributed architecture, AmberPoint radically simplifies the management and evolution of service-based business solutions. For more information, contact AmberPoint at 510-663-6300 or [e-mail], or visit the company website at www.amberpoint.com for a complimentary developer's edition of AmberPoint software.