IT managers seek help with Web services

05.12.2005
The spread of Web services has forced IT managers to seek out new tools to ease the cumbersome process of managing policies like security and performance.

"There are some policies that we think are best practices that we want to adhere to," said Chris Brown, senior IT architect at Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia Corp. "To date, adherence has been done manually, by review, [and] has been haphazard. We want to automate that."

A pair of vendors this week will be unveiling tools that promise to automate the process of managing Web services.

AmberPoint Inc. is releasing AmberPoint 5.0, a new version of its runtime services governance tools. And Mindreef Inc. is rolling out new services life-cycle management tools.

Security functions

The MedicAlert Foundation plans to install the new AmberPoint tools over the next few months to better manage the various security credentials -- user IDs and passwords or digital certificates -- that its customers use to enter new health information into their MedicAlert records, according to SOA architect Jorge Mercado.