Computer Associates has entered the web services management field with the shipment of its Unicenter Web Service Distributed Management product, which has come out of its acquisition of Adjoin last summer.

CA aims to shake up this market, which has been the preserve of small specialists, with its own weight and with a host of new partnerships. The new product gives network operators a way to monitor and track how web services applications are meeting predetermined performance thresholds. Performance is monitored and alerts sent of any problems.

Hewlett-Packard is likely to be the next giant to enter this space, since it acquired a start-up in the area, Talking Blocks, earlier this year to accelerate the addition of these capabilities into HP OpenView.

In CA’s systems, software ‘observers’, or embedded pieces of code within application servers, monitor messages sent between different web services applications and feed the data to Unicenter's existing systems management tools or those of third parties.

Partners have been signed up, including Microsoft, BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, JBoss, Collaxa, DataPower Systinet, whose tools will be able to share information with the new Unicenter module.

CA intends to support a forthcoming web services standard, Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM), which is set to be completed early next year.

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