Swingtide Announces Industry's First Pre-Emptive Software for XML and Web Services Management.

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PORTSMOUTH, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 3, 2003

New Products Untangle "XML Service Creep" and Automate XML

Interoperability

Swingtide, Inc., today announced two new software products that help businesses understand and make diverse XML standards work together - the first critical step to successful web services and service-oriented architectures.

QoB(TM) Lab and QoB Assistant are the first two in an integrated suite of products that automate the process of understanding, defining, managing and analyzing XML-based services. Swingtide will announce a software product for managing and analyzing networks of XML services later this year.

QoB Lab and QoB Assistant counter the effects of "XML service creep" - the uncontrolled way that XML is coming into many businesses - by quickly transforming programmers into XML productivity experts. The products reduce poor choices at design time that can result in downstream management cost and complexity, missed business opportunities, and poor online quality of business (QoB).

QoB Lab and QoB Assistant automate and accelerate the design of XML-based service networks by combining web-based software with a hands-on lab environment supported by a rich knowledge base.

"I attended Swingtide's QoB Lab and found it very valuable," said Mary Kay Aylsworth, vice president of information technology for Indiana Farmers Mutual Insurance Company. "The QoB Lab is helpful for companies designing or deploying XML. The QoB Lab is unique because it brings together the Java and .NET environments with multiple industry and technology standards. This unbiased methodology of how they all work together is invaluable."

The QoB Assistant knowledge base is a vendor-neutral, cross-standards resource for XML interoperability. The QoB Assistant blends a pre-populated knowledge base with an XML project-planning tool and an online community. It delivers distilled, relevant and cross-referenced intelligence on 12 different XML standards, breaking them down into more than 250 different interoperability elements in the areas of XML security, messaging, transactions and payload. Technical professionals get 24x7 online access to multi-vendor XML documentation, XML experts and leading XML service developers.

The QoB Lab is a three-day, intensive, hands-on technology session under the guidance of some of the world's foremost XML experts. Software architects and programmers will learn to make more-informed, far-reaching decisions about implementing XML, including choices involving XML standards, XML implementations and potential XML interoperability problems. Sessions cover XML fundamentals, security, data payloads, messaging, standards, and interoperability, as well as the ACORD insurance-industry standards and XML network management.

In creating the QoB Lab and the QoB Assistant knowledge base, Swingtide experts worked with other leading XML experts, including ACORD (insurance industry standards); Bret Hartman (security); David Platt, founder of Rolling Thunder Computing, Inc. (ACORD/XML/Microsoft.NET); and Sonic Software (messaging and standards-based integration). The knowledge base also includes public-domain documentation on SOAP, WSDL and other XML standards. All of this information is cross-referenced and easily searchable. The new Swingtide offerings help XML fulfill its promise by yielding "smarter" services that can be more easily managed, both by today's operations-focused web services management software and by next-generation XML management software, such as Swingtide's management product, which will be announced later this year.

"Swingtide has taken a unique and compelling approach to addressing the complexity of developing XML-based services," said Tom Rhinelander, founder of New Rowley Group, an industry research firm. "Its first two offerings fill a void in the industry: the critical need for companies to learn in-depth about, experiment with, and keep up to date on the intricacies of XML and web services."

Pre-Empting XML Interoperability Problems in Service-Oriented Architectures

XML is the lingua franca for making different computing systems interoperate seamlessly and intelligently. However, just because something is written in XML doesn't mean it will automatically work with other XML. As a result, the sheer volume of XML services, vocabularies and standards can overwhelm companies and their IT staffs. The SOAP XML messaging schema, for example, has nearly 150 rules, and ACORD standards for the insurance industry have more than 1,000 objects.

"The haphazard charge to web services management last year overlooked two critical steps: understand and define," said Jack Serfass, chairman of Swingtide. "Individual project teams may be making uninformed choices about XML that can affect the entire enterprise and result in costly rework later on - much like what customers experienced in the early days of SQL when there were so many different implementations and data structures. There are many industry-specific XML standards, like ACORD. These standards are converging with rapidly evolving horizontal XML standards. Understanding and getting everything to work together is a critical task that's crying for automation. If the XML network is not understood and defined, how can you manage it?"

David Sweet, Swingtide's president, said: "Businesses are moving to service-oriented architectures because they offer tremendous business opportunities, but to be successful with this transition they need to get ahead of XML service creep. The QoB Lab and QoB Assistant untangle XML service creep so customers can really understand its effect on their architectures and their enterprises. The products pre-empt a lot of the management cost by helping customers get XML right the first time so that they can cost-effectively scale their use of XML across the enterprise."

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink, said: "Service-oriented architectures based on XML and web services offer enormous benefit to enterprises in terms of cost savings and business agility. But building such architectures is a complex task that requires careful planning and design, especially in heterogeneous environments. Swingtide offers companies an in-depth, vendor-neutral approach to building the necessary skills real companies need to get started with SOAs. Of all the web services offerings we've seen, Swingtide's QoB Lab and QoB Assistant are unique in their ability to meet customers' need to understand how to leverage the power of XML and web services to build SOAs."

Accelerating Industry Adoption of XML

A key goal for Swingtide is to help accelerate new uses and applications of XML and web services across industries, beginning with insurance.

"The growing demand for web services solutions is often confronted by the challenges of the ever-widening development of XML standards across all industries," said Susan J. Ousey, senior vice president, ACORD. "The role Swingtide plays in XML education and getting the diverse standards to work together is important to businesses succeeding in this new environment. ACORD is pleased to see leading-edge services like those offered by Swingtide coming to fruition for our insurance members."

Swingtide plans to incorporate additional industry standards in the QoB Lab and QoB Assistant in the future.

QoB Lab: Learning from the XML "A Team"

QoB Lab attendees will learn how to create coherent and highly interoperable collections of XML services called "logical service networks." They also will learn how to create working models of their XML networks that complement enterprise systems management (ESM), web services management (WSM), or business intelligence (BI) software, as well as Swingtide's forthcoming XML management software. These models serve as reference implementations and expose XML meta data for management and ROI analysis.

Several insurance industry customers took part in the pilot QoB Lab in December 2002. A schedule and registration information for the 2003 QoB Labs are available on the web at www.swingtide.com.

The sessions are taught by a combination of Swingtide professional services staff and other industry experts.

QoB Assistant: Continuous Knowledge about XML

The QoB Assistant is more than software. It offers expert content and community to dramatically shorten developers' XML learning curves, reducing training costs and project delays. The product meets the needs of the many businesses that are scrambling to share XML expertise among their technical staffs. In most organizations, sharing expertise involves building developer intranets or emailing word processing documents. These processes often can't scale, and they cut into valuable application development time. The QoB Assistant lets development teams not only share internal expertise but also tap into the vast wealth of XML expertise available in the public domain.

The continually expanding QoB Assistant knowledge base covers important XML standards, including:

-- SOAP and ebXML (messaging)

-- WSDL (description)

-- XML Signature and WS-Security (security)

-- UDDI and WSIL (discovery)

-- ACORD (data payloads in the insurance industry)

Developers can keyword-search or navigate the knowledge base to locate the most appropriate standards, confirm dependencies, avoid conflicts between standards, and fine-tune their services before deploying them. The QoB Assistant provides resources for new XML developers as well as experts, and complements integrated development environments (IDEs) and other programming tools.

The QoB Assistant also includes productivity tools, such as discussion threads, e-mail notifications and alerts, and distance collaboration. Developers and project team leaders can use QoB Assistant documents to make specific choices of XML standards and then publish them across their organizations - including to external partners - as enterprise standards or best practices. The QoB Assistant alerts developers and business professionals when content is added or changed, so they can update their standards and pre-empt downstream interoperability problems.

Pricing and Availability

The QoB Lab and QoB Assistant are available immediately by calling 1-866-THETIDE (603-431-7900 from outside the US). Pricing for the QoB Lab starts at US$9,995 for three attendees, and pricing for the QoB Assistant starts at US$14,995 for a three-seat license. Pricing for the QoB Lab and QoB Assistant together starts at US$19,995 for three attendees and a three-seat license. Volume discounts are available. A free online test drive of the QoB Lab and the QoB Assistant is available at www.swingtide.com.

About Swingtide, Inc.

Swingtide is a venture-backed company offering software that maximizes the opportunity for Quality of Business (QoB) created by XML. Based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Swingtide was founded by veterans of the software industry who pioneered the use of XML web services in large-scale enterprise deployments and was conceived with the guidance of Fortune 1000 IT executives. Swingtide is backed by Pequot, an $8 billion financial-services company.

Swingtide, the Swingtide logo, Quality of Business and QoB are trademarks or service marks of Swingtide, Inc. Other company or product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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