"Time is on the side of these large management vendors," ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer said. "As time goes on, and (web services) management features become more and more required, the large vendors will increasingly catch up. The startups have a window of opportunity of at most another two years."
Those small companies that are not acquired will have to find a market niche to survive, Schmelzer said.
CA's management tools use embedded code within application servers to monitor messages, based on extensible markup language, sent between web services applications. The software monitors communication speeds and watches for failures in completing tasks, passing on the data to Unicenter's overall monitoring console, which also tracks the performance of hardware, such as servers and storage devices, and application infrastructure software.
As web services adoption accelerates, it will become more important to add monitoring tools as part of an overall IT management system. "You need to have that visibility. Otherwise, your creating more work for the poor guy in the data center that has to track down problems," Schmelzer said. "At some point, this all has to be pulled together."
Along with the release of Unicenter WSDM, Islandia, N.Y.-based, CA announced companies that have agreed to support the product, including BEA Systems, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, open-source application server maker JBoss Group, business process integration software maker Collaxa, DataPower, which makes tools for accelerating XML-based message traffic; and tools vendor Systinet.
