Mehul Shah, senior manager of Verizon Communications Inc.'s homegrown service-oriented architecture, called IT Workbench, said this type of support is useful today but will be required in the future.

As an SOA grows, the complexity of integration increases, boosting the difficulty of troubleshooting any issues that may arise in that environment, Shah said.

Once a problem is identified by Guardian, the user is offered various options, including downloading a patch to resolve it, linking to a database to obtain more information about it or talking to a customer support representative, Chipman said.

The system automatically sends that representative the required files for troubleshooting the problem.

Guardian will initially be available for use with BEA WebLogic 8.1 and later, with all subsequent releases and products built on the WebLogic application server.