Making Hay

Web service managers are off to an early start

Web services — last year's hype is this year's hope, with venture-backed startups vying for a slice of the management pie. Newly minted companies, such as Swingtide Inc. and Service Integrity, want to help monitor and analyze all the new XML traffic that will flow in ever increasing volume if Web services start to light up the network. It makes for a crowded and somewhat confusing field of Web service management vendors.

Jason Bloomberg, analyst with ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., says one way to make sense of it is to separate the players into active and passive managers. "Amberpoint and Confluent are two of the better-known active management vendors," he explains. Active management software is able to exert some control over the XML messages it monitors.

Swingtide and Service Integrity are passive players. "These guys just sit there and sniff," says Bloomberg: "They listen to the XML going by and create reports and alerts."

One advantage of these passive tools is a smaller footprint. "Our agents are about one megabyte," says Jack Serfass, chairman and cofounder of Swingtide. Service Integrity's CEO, Jothy Rosenberg adds, "Our overhead on the application server is only one to two milliseconds."

Bloomberg says Swingtide's people have a novel go-to-market plan: "Unlike most startups, they have been around for over a year with a service offering. They didn't rush to get a product to market, and are only now [May 19] releasing Monitor, their core software."

Another differentiator for Swingtide is a focus on vertical markets. Swingtide Monitor comes ready to understand ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development, www.acord.org), the XML schema specific to the insurance industry. "We plan to support others such as RosettaNet," says Serfass, referring to the XML specifications for the high-tech industry.

"RosettaNet is probably a ways down the road for them [Swingtide]," says Bloomberg. "They are starting with insurance, and I expect them to branch out into other financial areas before they tackle high tech."

Service Integrity's product, SIFT (Service Information Filtering and Tracking) debuts in June. "We don't have a vertical focus," said Rosenberg, "And we aren't just going after the Fortune 500. We think small and midsized companies are going to need these tools." SIFT features a proprietary XML parser. "It is extremely fast," says Rosenberg. "We don't need to do a full parse to get the information we need."

It's the kind of differentiation these new companies will need. "All the big management players, IBM/Tivoli, Hewlett-Packard, Computer Associates, and BMC Software Inc., are going to get into this space," says Bloomberg. "I expect it to happen in the 2005 timeframe. These startups have to make hay while the sun shines."

— Mark Leon

Mark Leon [mrleon@usfca.edu] has been reporting on business and technology for seven years.

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