Web services management software company, Infravio Inc., announced on Tuesday that it has ported its Ensemble Web services management suite to Hewlett-Packard Co.’s (HP) NonStop Platform, allowing for easier application integration for companies that use HP NonStops.
HP NonStop servers, part of HP’s high-end enterprise server lineup, were introduced in 1975 by Tandem Computing as commercial, fault-tolerant computer systems. They include hardware and software that is designed not to fail. The servers power business-critical firms such as banks, stock exchanges and worldwide telecommunications providers, said Wil Marshman, product manager for Web services at HP based in Cupertino, Calif.
Marshman said Infravio’s familiarity with Tandem is one of the reasons HP decided to use the company’s Web services management suite.
“Our customers are moving into Web services so they need to know that the products that they get can work in that kind of fashion in a Web services environment,” Marshman explained. “You can’t afford to have the stock market stop while you make a change.”
NonStop has about 4,000 customers worldwide. Twenty to 40 of those customers are looking at implemeting Web services and another 20 are already using it, he said.
With Infravio Ensemble — an end-to-end framework that manages the entire lifecycle of Web services from design and deployment to run-time operations, which lead to a services architecture — NonStop users can manage their Web Services service levels, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink in Waltham, MA.
Those users can also have access to flexible routing of Web Services requests and responses, can manage their Web services lifecycles and ensure scalability and fault-tolerance of their Web services running on the NonStop host, Bloomberg said.
“Fundamentally, the addition of Infravio makes HP NonStop a true enterprise-level platform for Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOA’s),” Bloomberg added.
Web services also bring value to legacy platforms in two ways, Bloomberg explained: First, by providing a Web services interface that can expose business logic and capabilities that were previously hard to access; and also by bringing the active capabilities of the host into more active use within a heterogeneous environment.
“Infravio’s solution helps with value propositions, but the second — bringing HP NonStop hosts into more active roles — is the most powerful,” Bloomberg said.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Patrick Vallaeys, vice-president of marketing at Infravio, said Ensemble customers benefit from enterprise system managmenet functionality, which includes monitoring, alerts and logging events. But they also gain access to an SOA, which includes management beyond primarily operational tools in Web services.
“[Ensemble] does more operational management and governance of services, which has to do with managing services as an asset of the company,” Vallaeys explained.
Infravio also offers a Distributed Broker — which is for companies that require high levels of availability and performance. It is software that acts as a hub to ensure real-time information is being communicated between the provider and the customer.
The broker runs on Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platforms including BEA WebLogic Server, IBM Corp.’s WebSphere and JBoss. It will soon be available on Microsoft Corp.’s .Net, Vallaeys said.
In related news, Infravio also announced that Sabre Holdings — a travel commerce, retailing travel products and distribution and technology solutions company for the travel industry — would use Infravio’s Ensemble 4.0 to build its own Web services program.
The single integrated platform that Sabre Holdings created using the Infravio Ensemble 4.0 governs aspects of a successful Web services delivery, Infravio said in a statement. For example, it helps service providers use the platform for publishing service offerings, updating services descriptions and documenting implementation guides.
The first phase of the project, an online services directory, is expected to be released in late January.
